Chloe Pascoe (she/her) is a junior in the College of Arts & Sciences at Georgetown University, studying Black Studies and Government. Her research interests include intersectional feminism, multicultural identity, and diasporic memory, particularly how these concepts can challenge dominant political, legal, and cultural principles. Her research is driven by a commitment to seek knowledge and imagination as paths for liberation.
Project: Colonial, Migrant, Black, British: Afro-Caribbean Women’s Narratives of Identity After Empire
The structure of imperial British metropolitan rule imposed British superiority in all aspects of colonial life. By the 1930s, the migration of Caribbean scholars seeking cultural enrichment within the imperial metropole helped transform London into the unofficial meeting place of the world’s Afro intellectuals. These encounters inspired a rethinking of their relationships to the empire in politics and personal motives, often concluding that greater autonomy in narrative-making was the first step to decolonization. With the arrival of the “Windrush generation” of Caribbean migrants came the unresolved matter of identifying oneself as a citizen of the unaccommodating white metropole while hailing from its colonized nations. For Afro-Caribbean women and their descendants in Britain, this split consciousness between being the Briton and the foreigner, the subject and the other, became a quintessential motif in their writings on identity formation. This project explores how Afro-Caribbean women writers represent the tensions of coalescing their gendered colonial and metropolitan identities with the notion of “Britishness.” Rather than viewing “multiculturalism” as a neoliberal project of the British, it investigates how Black women authors across Great Britain addressed the intricacies of multiculturality through the stories they told—the ancestral journeys from the West Indies to the British Isles, the embrace of political “Blackness” amid decolonization, and the eventual transformation into a “Black Briton” who carries these meaningful stories with them. By taking an intersectional approach to colonial identity, this project expands the view of Black internationalism to center Afro-Caribbean women scholars while focusing in on how their writings illuminate the complexities of identity after empire.