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This chapter considers the Cold War as the most important background against which there emerged a cultural and political imagery about a diasporic Chinese nation. It analyses the connections of currents of thought manifested in notions such as Overseas China or in intellectual currents such as Neo-Confucianism, with the controversial Cold War cultural infrastructure revealing how the latter pre-conditioned the materialization of a distinct type of Chinese nationalism in Hong Kong identity, as it is now known. It observes that there is a common belief that the rise of Hong Kong identity in the 1970s is attributable to the political awakening of Hong Kong's postwar baby-boomer generation to colonial oppression. It considers the indigenization of colonial power as the main motif informing and underlying the writings and the other practices of some of the latest members of the colonial intelligentsia.

This chapter considers the ways in which Richard Wright’s autobiography Black Boy influenced the Barbadian writer George Lamming’s autobiographical novel, In the Castle of My Skin. The discussion begins with a survey of Wright’s extensive interest in the circumCaribbean, and the experiences he had there. His friendship with Lamming provides insight into the latter’s admiration for both Wright and his works, and shows how this becomes evident in the Barbadian’s novel. Both texts were written in exile, a state that is explored using Edward Said’s theories, and accounts of Wright’s years in Paris and Lamming’s in London. Both novels, rightly seen as works of propaganda, are revealed to also be complex and lyrical works of art, employing a “palette of fire” to engage and challenge readers. Pertinent histories of Mississippi and Barbados add new angles of approach, and similarities between key characters - who illustrate the exigencies of colonial oppression and Jim Crow miseries - emerge through a use of literary theory and an arsenal of psycho-analytic tools. These issues are further examined through a reading of one of Wright’s related texts, the photo-documentary he compiled with Edwin Rosskam, Twelve Million Black Voices.

Between 1927 and 1930, African diaspora radicals, based in the United States, the Caribbean, and elsewhere, came together to mount radical and transnational challenges to colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy around the world. Black radicals like George Padmore and Richard B. Moore traveled to participate in the International Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism organized by the Comintern in Brussels in 1927 and worked to continue international organizing against imperialism in all its forms afterward. These radicals showed enthusiasm, for a time, about working with an international communist movement that appeared pledged to an anticolonial program. However, they struggled to build and maintain their agency as black people committed to black liberation in the face of the uncertainties and shifts of state policy.

This chapter introduces the major themes and coherent aims of the volume, arguing that colonialism is a subject of concern not simply as a condition of the past but also evolving and having impacts in the present and future. Archaeologies of colonialism, which encompass these perspectives, must grapple with the pitfalls and potentials of comparative approaches, most clearly evident when the voices of descendant communities are part of the study. Authors in this volume converge on two broad themes that are highlighted here: critical temporalities (conflicting concepts of past, future, and historical memory) and critical geographies (conflicting notions of local/global, native/immigrant, mainstream/marginal). Archaeologies of colonialism in this volume also seek to demonstrate that both the violence of colonial oppression and the agency and creativity of indigenous and marginalized peoples can and should be part of interpretation and representation, acknowledging that in some instances these perspectives are subject to contemporary conflict and tension.