Empire’’s Endgame: Racism and the British State

We are in a moment of profound overlapping crises. The landscape of politics and entitlement is being rapidly remade. As movements against colonial legacies and state violence coincide with the rise of authoritarian regimes, it is the lens of racism, and the politics of race, that offers the sharpest focus. In Empire’s Endgame, eight leading scholars make a powerful intervention in debates around racial capitalism and political crisis in Britain. While the ’hostile environment’ policy and Brexit referendum have thrown the centrality of race into sharp relief, discussions of racism have too often focused on individual behaviours. Foregrounding instead the wider political and economic context, the authors trace the ways in which the legacies of empire have been reshaped by global capitalism, the digital environment and the instability of the nation-state. Engaging with movements such as Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall, Empire’s Endgame offers both an original perspective on race, media, the state and criminalisation, and a political vision that includes rather than expels in the face of crisis.

Gargi Bhattacharyya is Professor of Sociology at University of East London. She is the author of Race and Power (2001), Sex and Society (2002), and Traffick (Pluto, 2005). Adam Elliott-Cooper is a Researcher in Social Sciences at Greenwich University. He has published on, and been a spokesperson for a number of campaigns, including Rhodes Must Fall, Why Is My Curriculum White? and Black Lives Matter UK. Sita Balani is a lecturer in contemporary literature and culture at King’s College London. In her research and teaching, she explores the relationship between imperialism and identity in contemporary Britain. Her work has appeared in Feminist Review, Identity Theory and openDemocracy. Kerem Nisancioglu is a Lecturer in International Relations at SOAS, University of London. He is the co-author of How the West Came to Rule (Pluto, 2015), and co-editor of Decolonising the University (Pluto, 2018). Kojo Koram is a lecturer at the School of Law at Birkbeck College, University of London. Dalia Gebrial is a PhD candidate at LSE, University of London. She is the editor of a special issue of the Historical Materialism journal on identity politics and co-editor of Decolonising the University (Pluto, 2017). Nadine El-Enany is Senior Lecturer in Law at Birkbeck School of Law and Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Race and Law. Her current research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, focuses on questions of race and criminal and social justice in death in custody cases. Nadine has written for numerous publications including the Guardian, Media Diversified, Left Foot Forward and Critical Legal Thinking. Luke de Noronha is an academic and writer working at the University of Manchester. He is the author of ’Deporting Black Britons: Portraits of Deportation to Jamaica’. Luke has written for the Guardian, Verso blog, VICE, Red Pepper, Open Democracy, The New Humanist, and Ceasefire Magazine.