Britannia S Children

The stories behind the mass exodus from Great Brittan from 1600 to modern times

BRITANNIA'S CHILDREN is a collection of eleven stories written over a period of 30 years and brought together for the first time. They illustrate Black-British dialect in their infancy. They speak of the past, the present and our possible future. For some, they will be a history lesson; others a trip down memory lane. Whichever category you occupy; read, enjoy and see beyond the words to discover their significance.

A revelatory portrait of Britain through its islands, The Britannias weaves history, myth, and travelogue to rewrite the story of this “island nation.” From Neolithic Orkney, Viking Shetland, and Druidical Anglesey to the joys and strangeness of modern Thanet, The Britannias explores the farthest reaches of Britain’s island topography, once known by the collective term “Britanniae” (the Britains). This expansive journey demonstrates how the smaller islands have wielded disproportionate influence on the mainland, becoming the fertile ground of political, cultural, and technological innovations that shaped history throughout the archipelago. In an act of feminist inquiry, personal adventure, and literary quest, Alice Albinia embarks on a series of journeys that traverse Britain and reach beyond its contemporary borders—from Europe to the Caribbean, Ireland to Scandinavia. She walks the coastlines of Lindisfarne, sails through the Hebrides archipelago, and bikes into Westminster at dawn. As she takes us across extravagantly varied island topographies and surveys centuries of history, Albinia ranges between languages and genres, and through disparate island cultures. She talks to stubbornly independent islanders and searches for archaeological and linguistic traces of island identities, discovering distinct traditions and resistance to mainland control. Trespassing into the past to understand the present, The Britannias uncovers an enduring and subversive mythology of islands ruled by women. Albinia finds female independence woven through Roman colonial reports and Welsh medieval poetry, Restoration utopias and island folk songs. These neglected epics offer fierce feminist countercurrents to mainstream narratives of British identity and shed new light on women’s status in the body politic today. Vivid, perceptive, and disruptive, The Britannias boldly upturns established truths about Britain while revealing its suppressed and forgotten beauty.

Many European countries, their imperial territories, and rapidly Europeanising imitators like Japan, established a powerful zone of intellectual, ideological and moral convergence in the projection of state power and collective objectives to children. This book is an introduction to the 'imperial' images of the Indian, African and Chinese, created for the youth of Britain through their history textbooks and popular periodicals. Focusing on materials produced for children, by textbook historians and the popular press, it provides a study of both the socialization of the young and the source of race perceptions in 20th-century British society. Against a backdrop of promoting the 'wonderful development of the Anglo-Saxon race', textbook historians approached British India as the primary example of imperial achievement. Chinese characters continued to feature in the periodicals in a variety of situations, set both in China and the wider world. Africa was a favoured setting for adventure in the years between the world wars, and African characters of long standing retained their popularity. While much of the 'improving' material began to disappear, reflecting the move toward a youth-centred culture, Indian, African and Chinese characters still played an important role in stories and features. The images of race continued into the inter-war years. The book shows how society secures the rising generation in the beliefs of the parent society, and how the myths of race and nationality became an integral part of Britain's own process of self identification.

Things fall apart when empires crumble. This time, we think, things will be different. They are not. This time, we are told, we will become great again. We will not. In this new edition of the hugely successful Rule Britannia, Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson argue that the vote to leave the EU was the last gasp of the old empire working its way out of the British psyche. Fuelled by a misplaced nostalgia, the result was driven by a lack of knowledge of Britain's imperial history, by a profound anxiety about Britain's status today, and by a deeply unrealistic vision of our future.

This book offers a variety of approaches to children's literature from a postcolonial perspective that includes discussions of cultural appropriation, race theory, pedagogy as a colonialist activity, and multiculturalism. The eighteen essays divide into three sections: Theory, Colonialism, Postcolonialism. The first section sets the theoretical framework for postcolonial studies; essays here deal with issues of "otherness" and cultural difference, as well as the colonialist implications of pedagogic practice. These essays confront our relationships with the child and childhood as sites for the exertion of our authority and control. Section 2 presents discussions of the colonialist mind-set in children's and young adult texts from the turn of the century. Here works by writers of animal stories in Canada, the U.S. and Britain, works of early Australian colonialist literature, and Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess come under the scrutiny of our postmodern reading practices. Section 3 deals directly with contemporary texts for children that manifest both a postcolonial and a neo-colonial content. In this section, the longest in the book, we have studies of children's literature from Canada, Australia, Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States.