25
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
1 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      Race, Racialisation and ‘Colonial Common Sense’ in Capital Cases of Men of Colour in England and Wales, 1919–1957

      research-article
      1 , , 1
      Open Library of Humanities
      Open Library of Humanities

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisher
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          This article explores the role of ‘colonial common sense’ ( Stoler, 2008) in racialising men of colour in capital cases in twentieth-century England and Wales. Following the First World War psychiatric and psychological discourses became more prominent in both the criminal justice system and the wider culture, but were not the primary means through which race was constructed in capital trials. Rather, colonially informed common sense understandings of racial difference were more significant and were themselves an aspect of medical expertise, such as prison medicine. The article discusses cases such as Djang Djin Sung, the first man of colour to be executed in England after the First World War, Lock Ah Tam, who was hanged in 1926 despite benefiting from a well-funded insanity defence and Eric Dique, who murdered his girlfriend in 1956. Analysis of cases of men of colour sentenced to death in this period contributes to uncovering the history of racism in the criminal justice system.

          Related collections

          Most cited references48

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: not found
          • Book: not found

          Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902–1935

            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: not found
            • Book: not found

            Race and Empire in British Politics

              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: not found
              • Book: not found

              Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense

                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                2056-6700
                Open Library of Humanities
                Open Library of Humanities
                2056-6700
                04 October 2019
                2019
                : 5
                : 1
                : 64
                Affiliations
                [1 ]University of Sussex, UK
                Article
                10.16995/olh.471
                a13841e3-4f06-408e-b95f-58edce2a3790
                Copyright: © 2019 The Author(s)

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

                History
                Categories
                Literature, law and psychoanalysis

                Literary studies,Religious studies & Theology,Arts,Social & Behavioral Sciences,History,Philosophy

                Comments

                Comment on this article