Race, citizenship and rights: the case of Britain in the 1950s with Allan Hepburn

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights promotes the distribution of rights and freedoms ‘without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status' (Article 2). Throughout the 1950s, UNESCO published a series of statements and pamphlets about racial equality, with a focus on social constructions of race. Kenneth L Little, Michel Leiris, Claude Lévi-Strauss and others contributed to this series.

Little pioneered the interdisciplinary field of race relations with Negroes in Britain (1947), a study of the black community in Cardiff. As an anthropologist based at the University of Edinburgh, he trained a generation of researchers, among who were Michael Banton, Anthony Richmond and Sheila Patterson. In various book-length studies, these researchers documented the living conditions, kinship patterns, sense of belonging and citizenship status of racialised immigrant communities in the UK.

They were also integral to the formation of the Institute of Race Relations in 1958. Despite assurances of tolerance and universal equality from the British government, 1950s fiction tells a different story about rights, citizenship and race than do immigration laws. This presentation will take into account the literary representation of race in such works as To Sir with Love, The Chequerboard, Absolute Beginners and Dr No, with respect to the UN commitment to equality and the British conception of citizenship as a national, legal, yet deeply racialised political problem.