Women's History Month Lecture: "The Repatriation of W.S. Connolly, and Other Trips Home

Through an intimate, familial view of British imperialism and its consequences, Professor Nathan Connolly (Johns Hopkins University) explores the meaning of gender, interracial marriage, and generational memory in the Atlantic World.  The summer of 1919, so-called Red Summer, brought racial violence to England, Latin American, the U.S., and the Caribbean. In the throes of that unrest, British colonial officials and their subjects established a "Repatriation" program, meant to send African and Asian descended people back to the remote corners of the empire. In sort order, all the apparent simplicity of merely sending people "back" raised powerful and fraught questions about who counted as British, what counted as black, and what to do with the white wives of Britain's black men. The answers to those questions would not just affect the lives of the people living in the wake of the Great War. They would echo forward through generations of black Atlantic families, shaping in no small way the meaning of West Indian identity--indeed, manhood and womanhood--for the remainder of the twentieth century.