Performing identity: colonial migrants,passing and mimicry between the wars

Abstract

This study examines how colonial migrants appropriated the performative identity strategies of passing and mimicry to gain inclusion into the diverse imperial and national spaces of Britain, Europe and the dominions. Mimicry and passing were both creative liberational migrant strategies as well as responses to powerful constraints operating against colonial newcomers in the West. The first section investigates the methodology and manifestations of race passing and the metropolitan environment that fostered it. The second section explores how and why class mimicry was deployed by colonial and non-colonial racial migrants and the balance of epistemological distance and proximity necessary for its operation. The last section focuses on spatialized colonial mimicry of imperial masculinity, citizenship, travel cultures and geographies of belonging.