"History Unhoused: Imagining Redress in Post-imperial Britain," investigates the way in which contemporary narratives and performances of migration dislodge violent colonial and postcolonial histories from their particular sites of encounter, and interrogates the politics of new migrant public cultures in transit across global terrain. The dissertation analyzes the critical and theoretical issues surrounding the reproduction of violence within colonial, postcolonial, and neo-colonial regimes, and considers in particular the problem of responsibility and redress at the heart of postcolonial creative practices. Specifically, the dissertation considers what I see as a generational turn to a creative, performative historical engagement in contemporary black British narratives of migration, narratives that stage a critical redressive historiography by imagining the possibility of historical justice in the face its undeniable belatedness and insufficiency. I argue that such a critical redress is founded on a situated ethics operating outside of the logic of monetary equivalency such as reparations or restitution.

While I examine contemporary transnational public cultures formed through movements between Britain and its former colonies, I am also concerned with the long-durational history of displacements that have followed from the advance of mercantile and then industrial capitalism, and subsequently colonialism and imperialism. I analyze the way in which the exhibition of visual, literary, and performative texts brings this history into public, restructures both contemporary British and transnational social imaginaries, and opens up new spaces for the critique of violence and the appeal for social justice.

The texts I discuss circulate within both British and transnational publics, and are created by writers and artists from various postcolonial locales in Africa and the Caribbean. In this interdisciplinary project I consider the novelists Fred D'Aguiar and Caryl Phillips, the performance poet Dorothea Smartt, and film, video and installation artists Isaac Julien, Yinka Shonibare, and Inge Blackman. I demonstrate how embodied experiences of publicness—in and through the performance, exhibition, and circulation of their literary, visual and performance texts—open up a space through which we might imagine a redress "to come."