“Internal Frontiers”: Whiteness, Intimacy, and the Expatriate Home in Britain's African Colonies during the Postwar Period

Abstract

Using archival oral history interviews with ex-colonial officers from the Scottish Decolonisation Project and the British Empire and Commonwealth Collection, this article examines the intimate lives and domestic spaces of white expatriates in Britain's African colonies during the postwar period, often described as the “people's empire.” In doing so, it seeks to better understand the socio-historical construction of imperial whiteness. It argues that the boundaries of the expatriate home acted as the “internal frontiers” of whiteness, insofar as racial difference was constructed through habitual bodily and domestic discipline concerning cleanliness, child-rearing, social interactions, and sex, which was monitored and enforced within expatriate social circles. Oral testimonies from white expatriates who lived and worked in colonial Africa highlight the contradictory nature of the discursive construction of whiteness, as both culturally distant from the African peoples over which it claimed racial superiority and dependent on operations of care and nurture provided by indigenous Africans. This article explores the ways in which Africans forged relationships with white expatriates as servants, lovers, and friends in order to examine how these ambivalent intimacies coexisted with, and were constitutive of, unequal racial hierarchies.