Overview
This talk will explore the long history of Britain’s changing nationality and immigration legislation on members of the Windrush Generations by drawing upon oral history interviews which have been conducted as part of a three-year AHRC funded project, ‘The Windrush Scandal in its Transnational and Commonwealth Context’. It will focus on issues of nationality, identity and belonging, exploring various responses to being denied British citizenship status at key historical junctures through to the present-day, Windrush Scandal. It reveals settled migrants were often-times unaware that independence in their country of birth could impact their right to remain in Britain and that those rights were further eroded by laws, which sought to restrict the entry of particular Commonwealth citizens to the UK. It indicates too the many challenges and complexities associated with the process of regularisation and the real world, often devastating, implications of immigration legislation on the lived experience of the Windrush Generations.
Speaker
Dr Juanita Cox is a leading authority on the life and work of the Guyanese novelist, Edgar Mittelholzer (1909-1965) and is editor of the compendium, Creole Chips and Other Writing (2018). She co-founded the ground-breaking series Guyana SPEAKS in 2017, an education and networking forum, which has become a key monthly event in the calendar of the London-based Guyanese diaspora. In 2019 she worked on the “Nationality, Identity and Belonging: An Oral History of the ‘Windrush Generation’ and their Relationship to the British State, 1948-2018” project at the University of London’s Institute of Commonwealth Studies and is currently working within the same institute on a three-year AHRC-funded oral history project, “The Windrush Scandal in a Transnational and Commonwealth Context”. She has developed strong ties with Black British Caribbean community groups and is a trustee on the Board of the Oral History Society.
Details
This is an online event which will take place on Zoom.
If you would like to attend, please register for the Zoom link.
The Humanities Society organises regular talks spanning a wide range of topics. Every Tuesday during term time.
