The talk explores how Asian women became unassimilable in social work and public discourse in 1970s Britain. In the context of decolonization and deindustrialization, the Pakistani woman who worked for wages posed a threat to the stability of the white male working class. To keep the Pakistani woman at home, social workers created new forms of intervention into marriages, offered English language classes to mothers at day care centers, and extended the hand of friendship. From this perspective, multiculturalist policies created Asian women as non-workers who needed extensive social welfare intervention. In doing so, these policies reproduced the working class as male and white and the Asian woman as trapped by tradition.
Radhika Natarajan is assistant professor of history and humanities at Reed College in Portland, OR. Her research focuses on the remaking of imperial strategies of managing difference during decolonization. Her article “Performing Multiculturalism: the Commonwealth Arts Festival of 1965” appeared in the Journal of British Studies, and she has also written essays on the transcolonial routes of community development and British social work intervention into Asian marriages. She is writing a book, Empire and the Origins of Multiculturalism, which examines encounters between British social work and migrants from the decolonizing empire during the era of the welfare state.
Date | Time
October 20, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, October 20th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.
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