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The chapter explores how Richard Wright, the great American author and black radical, in his concern with the dynamics of European decolonisation, envisaged the effects of the end of British rule overseas. This brings to light some of the connections between British decolonisation and US Civil Rights. In order to do this I explain the centrality of black Paris to the making of Wright, and the influence of a generation of Caribbean intellectuals on his life, literature and politics. The chapter closes with a discussion of Wright’s reading of Nkrumah’s Gold Coast Revolution. This story highlights the transnational nature of decolonisation, as well as its intersections with Cold War politics.

In 1961 Māori artist Ralph Hotere moved to London to study at the Central School of Art, subsequently settling in Vence, France, before he returned to New Zealand in 1964. He became part of a cultural moment that has been called ‘New Commonwealth Internationalism’, in which artists from British ex-colonies, fed by an anti-colonial awareness and an alliance to the processes of decolonisation happening internationally, reinserted the human condition into formalist modernism. Hotere’s paintings from this period make reference to the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria, and the human rights movement, along with other forms of 1960s protest. Applying the term ‘decolonisation’ to Hotere’s fine art illustrates the possibilities of indigenous modernism – and of creativity more broadly – as a decolonising process, while highlighting the need to understand decolonisation through a transnational lens. By articulating Hotere’s investment in the project shared by many native artists who went to London after the Second World War and revitalised late modernism with the issues of anti-colonial struggle, and in identifying how this was not necessarily shared by settler artists from New Zealand who followed the same trajectory, the different projects of decolonisation caught up in the moment of New Commonwealth Internationalism are made visible.

The rise of Black Power in the black Atlantic world of the late 1960s transformed the cultural politics of decolonisation in Britain and the Caribbean. In the injunction to ‘think black’ was a demand to re-orientate and to understand differently the social relations of artistic production in a decolonising culture. The legacy of this period still partly determines the parameters of postcolonial and black cultural studies today. This chapter explores this transition through the Caribbean Artists Movement, an artists’ group whose existence spanned the rupture between this secondary politics of decolonisation and early anti-colonial artistic practices.

In a post-war world of austerity and privation, visions of plenty often held out the possibility of liberation and regeneration. But those visions just as frequently codified “plenty” as something to be mistrusted, if not gravely threatening. Sharing a deep ambivalence over the abundance they depict, artitsts John Bratby and Richard Hamilton, and film makers Brian Desmond Hurst and Basil Dearden, all employ an “aesthetics of plenty” that both contests and contains competing post-war impulses of desire and denial. Further, they each locate the body as the critical site for the playing out of ubiquitous anxieties of race, gender, nationhood and decolonisation. Their shared visions of abundance simultaneously invoke a desirous world of plenty in the most unsettling and ambivalent terms. Bratby’s painting Jean and Still Life in Front of Window (1954), Hamilton’s collage Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956), and the feature films Simba (Brian Desmond Hurst 1956) and Sapphire (Basil Dearden 1959) each offer competing and complementary points of rupture where the discourses of empire, race, class, the body, and the nation all meet as images of compelling abundance become images of troubling abandon.

The process of decolonisation refers to both struggles against colonial authorities and those against local elites who acquired and abused power after independence. Such struggles often sought inspiration through transnational networks, as illustrated by the global resonance of the nationalist independence struggle in Vietnam since 1945, against French and American domination. This chapter focuses on Indian movements in support of Vietnam which began in Bengal even before the independence of India. Such processes intensified after independence as leftist politics in Bengal merged Vietnamese struggles with the idiom of the local agrarian struggles that operated as the fulcrum of leftist politics. Utpal Dutt’s Invincible Vietnam (1966) was not only a product of these political and cultural processes but also contributed to them. The play was part of Dutt’s programme of ‘revolutionary theatre’, designed to revive the native traditions of militant struggle through the creation of a transnational idiom of national and international revolutionary struggles. This chapter focuses on Invincible Vietnam within this context, and locates this as part of Dutt’s larger project of staging the subaltern, especially since his plays were performed in front of hundreds of peasants and workers.

The topos of inheriting the built legacy of the temples of Angkor (9^th to 13^th centuries CE) had been a vital element of the French-colonial civilizing mission in Cambodia from 1863 onwards. Yet this claim on ‘cultural heritage’ (or cultural inheritance) was subject to a novel ideological twist when Cambodia became independent in 1953. The classic ‘salvage paradigm’ once practiced by the European colonial power was now appropriated by the newly independent, quasi-‘Neo-Angkorian’ nation state (1954–1970). In this chapter, three different scenarios of this process are discussed: first, the reinvention (as continuation) of the genealogical and religious tradition of the ancient Khmer kings as central element of a new Buddhist socialism of the Non-Aligned country of Cambodia; second, the revival of the grandeur of the built Angkorian antiquity in a modern-day architectural interpretation in vast building programmes for the new-old capital of Phnom Penh and the provinces under state architect Vann Molyvann; and third, the staging of various cultural performances and re-enactments è la Angkorienne within Sihanouk’s strategies of cultural diplomacy, both inside Cambodia with sound-and-light shows inside the Archaeological Park of Angkor, and around the globe through the king’s private Royal Khmer Ballet.

Focusing on the national museums of Ghana and Mali, this chapter examines the ways in which cultural heritage was dealt with in these institutions, alongside the modernisation projects of these emerging nation states. The National Museum of Ghana occupied a complex conceptual space in the years preceding and following independence. By displaying material culture from across the nation, the museum participated in Ghana’s ongoing nation building. However, it also had a duty to avoid presenting the diversity of cultures in a divisive way to accord with Nkrumahist efforts to promote national unity as well as Pan-Africanism. In contrast, The National Museum of Mali suffered during the decolonisation era and was not recognised as a public space for displaying cultural heritage. For young Malians, the processes of transmitting cultural values from the state to the citizens were more successfully achieved by the hugely popular annual events (les semaines de la jeunesse) launched by the ‘pioneers’ in 1960 than by their own museums.

This chapter uses the oral history narratives of six post-war British migrants to southern Africa to analyse the impact of decolonisation on individuals. With attention to performances of identity such as accent, interior design and leisure, it traces shifts in the ways these migrants positioned themselves and made sense of political changes such as the 1961 South African declaration of Republic, the 1965 Rhodesian Unilateral Declaration of Independence and the onset of majority rule in Zimbabwe in 1980 and South Africa in 1994. Nostalgia, especially for the southern African landscape and wildlife, was a common theme in these accounts, one that provided a way to discuss the loss of settler cultures without reference to race or politics. The chapter highlights the dislocation experienced by these migrants as a result of decolonisation, and demonstrates the value of oral history evidence to understanding the distinct cultures of decolonisation.

With a focus on ‘practised architecture’, this chapter contests the understanding of physical things as mere mirrors of social norms and economic interests, stretching the analysis of decolonisation beyond political and economic narratives. The Volta River Project, a river basin development scheme conceived in late colonial Africa and vigorously re-cast as a postcolonial symbol, offers ideal terrain to expose conflicting ideas of decolonisation as they were enacted during and after Ghana’s lengthy ‘transitional’ phase. It presents the work of different architectural practices involved in the design of new industrial towns and resettlement villages, exposing their conflicting ideas about the temporalities and spatialities of decolonisation. Their overlap presents decolonisation’s increasingly transcultural and transnational nature, as it became more than a unilateral relationship between empire and colony. As former colonial influences began to fade away, architects re-imagined urban models, using the occasion to invest design with ideals of liberation, but also remained tied to evolutionary biases. Attempts at decolonising Ghana’s built and cultural environment also illustrate the tension between market-oriented self-help housing and the extension of government-led developmentalism, a tension which illustrates decolonisation’s major paradoxes, caught between nation-building and (critical) internationalism.

Designs on currency are often seen as markers of political change, with the change in images at independence seen as a visual representation of the new nation. However, most studies have explored these issues in only one country, and focussed on the relationship between the new nation and its former colonial power. Here a comparative approach is taken, examining the design of coins for newly-independent Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania to uncover the regional, as well as the domestic, international and transnational, dimensions of this change. Examining the process of designing and producing coins for these African countries, and the individuals and organisations (including the Bank of England and the Royal Mint) involved, shows that coin design and production changed only gradually during the period of decolonisation. It also demonstrates that the various political and commercial interests of the individuals and organisations involved affected the choices made about what images appeared on coins after independence. The chapter concludes by briefly considering the legacy of these debates in contemporary decisions about the designs for African currencies.

This essay argues that an examination of the cultural effects of decolonisation can yield a clearer appreciation of the combined role of both coloniser and colonised in the making of the postcolonial order. Taking an approach informed by Michel Foucault, Jean-François Bayart and Romain Bertrand, it shows that the ethnic tensions which erupted over questions of national language planning, multilingualism, and culture in postcolonial Malaya, and persist through to the present, cannot be explained away as a simple “colonial legacy” inflicted by British divide-and-rule policies. They must also be recognised as the result of a particular hegemonic configuration, produced and maintained through the agency of postcolonial subjects themselves.

This chapter sets out the key arguments of Cultures of Decolonisation. It begins by exploring the existing historiography of decolonisation, before explaining the value of the interdisciplinary and transnational approach taken in the volume. It then delineates the authors’ approach to reframing the role of culture in decolonisation, highlighting three main arguments and strands of investigation. First, a claim is made for the agency of culture in a process more often understood through a political-economic lens; second, the value of focusing on the role of cultural institutions in decolonisation is emphasised; and third, the chapter contends that it is crucial to recognise the transnational and comparative character of cultures of decolonisation (and of decolonisation itself).