Cruel Colonial Re-imaginings

At a time when late modernity’s cumulative catastrophes multiply seemingly unabated—an acute peak in nationalisms and transnational fascisms; imperial bordering regimes and their Black deathscapes; capitalist predation with its attendant ecocides and social deaths; the submission of liberal democracy, whose logics of tolerance quietly sustain the architectures of racial violence; censorship’s tightening noose, smothering dissident voices, critical media, and scholarship, while disappearing or killing anti-war protesters; alongside the normalization of oppressions, dispossessions, and genocides, sustained by coalitions of imperial savagery—it appears that premature human and more-than-human deaths, are so intimately woven into the fabric of our everyday lives.

In an intriguing podcast by the Funambulist titled “The Beginning of a Perfect Decolonial Moment”, Ruth Wilson Gilmore asks, “If the patterns we’ve learned to rely on have become inadequate to requirements, then how should we fight?”

How should we fight?

How do we fight?

How do I fight?

Perhaps one ‘minor gesture,’ one minor act of fighting I can offer, begins with writing—with daring to inscribe words that challenge, disrupt, and hopefully transform.

Steve Biko, the South African anti-apartheid activist and founder of the Black Consciousness Movement, insisted on the power of writing what we like; words as acts of defiance, as tools of liberation. To write in times of tyranny, to write against tyranny, is not only to record the present but to rewrite its future possibilities. Writing itself becomes a fight against silence, against active forgetting or remembering to forget; confronting historical distortions whose legacy is relentless contemporary violence.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, the late Haitian-American anthropologist, reminds us in his seminal book, Silencing the Past, of precisely this power: “historical authenticity resides not in the fidelity to an alleged past but in an honesty vis-à-vis the present as it re-presents that past.”

With Trouillot’s powerful provocation in mind, this reflection weaves together three critical threads: the persistence of colonial architectures that seek to contain Black subjects across geographies; the coloniality embedded in discourses of refugee ‘protection,’ and how racialized narratives of Black masculinities in the U.K., intensified by affective currents of panic and disgust, uphold contemporary imperial bordering regimes.

Architectures of Empire: The Ship as Imperial Haunting

“The ships are still [here] … the slave ship is pulling up to the shores of modernity again.”

Bayo Akomolafe, 2024

I came across this image of a Haitian girl in Christina Sharpe’s book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. (CW: Distressing Image - See below note*) In the aftermath of the 2010 Haitian earthquake, this young Black girl had the label “ship” stuck to her forehead. Presumably labelled by humanitarian workers for evacuation to a US military medical ship named ‘Comfort,’ Sharpe asks:

“how does one mark someone for a space—on a ship—who is already marked by it?”

Indeed, one would be engaging in profound imperial amnesia to overlook how the image recalls the Middle Passage—the transatlantic slave trade—and the haunting motif of the slave ship that carried countless kidnapped Africans to Haiti, and across the Americas, with the British Empire at the helm of this brutal crime. More than merely symbolic, the image actively enacts the violence of imperial time, demonstrating how temporal imperialism inscribes colonial pasts directly onto Black bodies today. Turning human subjects into things—into human cargo—bodies as material; reminiscent of ever-present pasts.

What acts of forgetting, of wilful unseeing, are at work in placing the label ‘ship’ on her forehead? How does this gesture reveal that ‘saving’ has long been steeped in imperial violence? That in fact helping is part of the architecture of the problem?

Militarized humanitarianism—foreign occupation and containment under the guise of care—spearheaded by western governments like France, the U.S., the U.K. and Canada, have been central to the construction of Haiti as a nation that lies outside of western notions of ‘progress,’ building on tropes that naturalise the relationship between Blackness and poverty, Blackness and criminality, Blackness as inherently ungovernable.

In 2010, the US Army prioritised first ‘securing the Haitian island’—in other words, containing its Black subjects on the island—before providing life-saving assistance, with devastating lethal effects for thousands of Haitians.

These imperial gestures and logics of containment, however, are not unique to Haiti. They find expression elsewhere, in different forms and places.

Across the Atlantic in August 2023, the Bibby Stockholm arrived in Dorset, UK. This vessel, owned by the Bibby Line Group, was previously used to transport both cargo and passengers. The Bibby Stockholm, a vessel without an engine, was introduced as a supposed ‘solution’ by the UK Government for the accommodation of thousands of asylum seekers, individuals excluded from both the labour market and the broader UK welfare system. Through an open letter signed by over 50 NGOs, the founder of the British Bibby Line shipping company was exposed as having links to the Atlantic slave trade, as the co-owner of three slave ships.

Britain’s rise as a global power is, of course, a story of violence, plunder and oppression, as one of the biggest and most efficient slave nations, buying and selling millions of Africans.  

Asylum-seekers, all of whom were young single men, described the vessel as overcrowded, claustrophobic, retraumatising, and prison-like.

The imbrication of colonialism, racism and migration is self-evident.

Bayo Akomolafe -- Slave Ship 1

These two ships—Comfort and Bibby Stockholm—separated by geography but intimately bound by history, illuminate Trouillot’s assertion that “the past fails to stay in the past.” They reveal how racial arrangements and structures of subjugation persist across different contexts, demonstrating that although forms of racialized violence evolve, their foundational logics and architectures endure.

Protectorate/Protection

I was born in Lesotho, a British Protectorate from 1868 until independence in 1966. The term “protectorate” originates from the Latin protegere, meaning “to protect”—the same etymology as “protection” in refugee protection today. Although protectorates were theoretically meant to safeguard weaker states, in practice British ‘protection’ masked economic exploitation, using territories like Lesotho as labour reservoirs. Young Basotho men laboured under harsh conditions in South African mines, allowing Britain indirect economic benefit.

As a scholar of discourse and affect—the politics of emotions—I’m attuned to how language obscures power imbalances and sustains historical erasures. Thus, I approach terms like “protection” sceptically, particularly within Western liberal rhetoric. Without historical perspective, we overlook how discourses of protection served colonial purposes, sustaining imperial amnesia. British protection historically asserted British ‘civilization’ and superiority, casting those allegedly protected as inferior and pitied subjects in need of saving.

Basutoland 1954 Definitives, De La Rue 1

As critical scholars of race, nation, citizenship, and law have stressed, accepting contemporary legal categories associated with humanitarian protection, such as “refugee,” without critique, leaves the nation-state’s colonial roots and its ongoing erasures, dispossessions, and exclusions unchallenged.

As Bridget Anderson so incisively calls to attention, it’s imperative for the liberal order and the legitimacy of European border controls that they are not perceived as racist. EU and British policymakers would have us believe that nationality, not race, drives immigration control logics. Yet, we know well, that nationality is itself a social construct, deeply rooted in colonial-racial foundations. Nationality has thus, as Radhika Mongia makes clear, played a pivotal role in the post-imperial regulation of race, territory, and statehood.

Ignoring these repressed histories and their structural effects obscures the ways in which law participates in racial violence, producing racialized subjects through categories like the “refugee,” and the racialised forms of humanitarian exception extended to those deemed innocent and deserving by the state. As I argue in my recently published article, Being Deathworthy, UK and European border controls are not only racist, but are also key sites in the cultivation and management of white nationhood.

Constructing ‘Threat’: Black Masculinities and UK’s Affective Borders

In my forthcoming book, Strange Fish, I examine the role of affect in justifying UK immigration policies during the peak of the European “refugee” crisis.

I conceptualise affect as the actions and effects of emotions observable through cultural and political practices. Affect is what emotions enact, what emotions do in the public domain. Emotions don’t simply express feelings; they structure relations of power.

They function as a racial ordering and bordering technology.

Drawing on queer feminist theory, I conducted an extensive content analysis of nearly 4,000 UK media articles and key political speeches. A persistent framing emerged, depicting asylum seekers as predominantly “young single males,” frequently portrayed as invasive, criminal, sexually threatening, ultimately incompatible with vulnerability—made objects of panic, disgust, and resentment.

This framing device has since persisted. For instance, former Home Secretary Priti Patel stated in her 2021 immigration policy announcement that the “fundamental problem” was “young men” dominating asylum applications over more “vulnerable” groups. Similarly, in 2022, the Home Office’s Channel Threat Commander stressed the rising numbers of “single adult men,” echoed again by Suella Braverman, who repeatedly emphasized that the majority of new arrivals were “adult males under the age of 40” associated with “criminal gangs.”

Indeed, the figure of the Black, and Muslim or Arab man, and boy, has long been constructed in British discourse as an existential threat to English civility and values, frequently framed as a cultural, criminal, terrorist, and sexual threat. More recently, “subaltern whites,” as Fischer-Tiné calls them—such as the often-mentioned Albanians—have been depicted similarly, revealing how whiteness produces classed subjects.

Historically, these racialized anxieties surrounding single, young males echo deep-seated imperial fears about interracial intimacy, racial purity, and morality. Positioned as a frontier of national purity and racial coherence, the white female body becomes subtly instrumentalized within these anxieties. This invokes historical fears, reminiscent of Britain’s early 20th-century debates around the 1905 Aliens Act—Britain’s first modern immigration law—which explicitly targeted and sought to regulate ‘undesirable intimacies,’ including between Black/Brown men and white British women.

Making these migrant men objects of disgust and panic serves a crucial spatial purpose, actively shaping where and how racialised bodies are contained, managed and expelled. It’s no coincidence that those sent to the Dorset vessel were all single young men, or that the individuals meant to be relocated to Rwanda under the UK deportation agreement were also said to be young men. The intention of these policies was not to house or provide humanitarian protection, but rather to isolate, to separate, to make invisible.

Imbued with this legacy of disgust and panic over ‘miscegenation,’ the presence of young single Black men raises alarms about Britain’s future. The metaphor of the nation as woman introduces a crucial, though subtle, temporal element: the violation of the body/nation breaches its borders but also threatens continuity by undermining white reproductive capacity. A future foreclosed. A future long imagined to be ‘civil’ but, above all, white.

Here, we’re reminded of how works of queer and Black feminist scholars have long demonstrated that the nation is fundamentally constructed through gendered and sexualized logics, historically sustained by racialized narratives around reproduction, vulnerability, and national belonging.

Reckoning with History: Writing as Fighting

“We haven’t even remembered and we’re already trying to forget”

Nicholas Mirzoeff, 2025

In keeping with Trouillot’s insight, what is at stake in confronting the past is our collective future—our process of becoming. The past is neither distant nor dormant; it actively shapes contemporary discourses on refugee ‘protection,’ migration, and racialized violence.

To write, then, is to fight: to stage a confrontation with the cruel colonial re-imaginings that persist, obscured yet alive, within the very frameworks we call ‘protection’ today.

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*Content Warning: Distressing Image.

The editorial team and I have deliberately chosen not to reproduce this image here, mindful of Saidiya Hartman’s caution against the casual reiteration of Black suffering, which risks “immuring us to pain” rather than inciting indignation. Such visual displays often unintentionally reinforce racialized, colonial logics by rendering Black bodies passive objects of a violent gaze. Tina Campt similarly emphasises the ethical stakes of visual representation, highlighting how the repeated circulation of images depicting Black pain can obscure rather than illuminate the human realities behind such suffering. This decision thus seeks to disrupt, rather than reproduce, the spectacle of racialized violence.