'Festering Britain': the 1951 Festival of Britain, decolonisation and the representation of the Commonwealth

Tools

Littler, Jo. 2006. 'Festering Britain': the 1951 Festival of Britain, decolonisation and the representation of the Commonwealth. In: Simon Faulkner and Anandi Ramamurthy, eds. Visual Culture and Decolonisation in Britain. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 21-42. ISBN 9780754640028 [Book Section]

Preview

Text
MCCS-Littler2006a.pdf - Accepted Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial.
Download (285kB) | Preview

Official URL: https://www.routledge.com/Visual-Culture-and-Decol...

Abstract or Description

This chapter suggests that a helpful framework is to consider how such images flow and connect to discourses of imperial mastery, benevolent partnership and national parochialism. The 1951 Festival of Britain has been re-imagined and resurrected in many different guises. For Consisting of events held up and down the country, the Festival of Britain has mainly and merely become synonymous with the exhibitions on the specially regenerated area of London's South Bank that was often taken at the time to be its centrepiece. The entity termed 'the Commonwealth' signified both the moves towards decolonisation as the empire crumbled, and the attempt to maintain and reinscribe some of the power dynamics of imperialism. The idea of Britain's 'benevolence' to the Commonwealth was frequently articulated by recourse to a language of 'partnership', together with an emphasis on how Britain was helping to manage or engineer peace.

Item Type:

Book Section

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429401367

Additional Information:

"This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Ashgate in Visual Culture and Decolonisation in Britain in 2006, available online: https://www.routledge.com/Visual-Culture-and-Decolonisation-in-Britain/Ramamurthy-Faulkner/p/book/9781138394148. It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way."