The title of this important and provocative collection presents the problematic concepts of visual culture and decolonization, neither of which is easily contained by the third concept, Britain. Sometimes phased and planned, decolonization was also a congeries of events and lurches, sudden or slow rebalances of power, momentary spurts of liberated energies, and longer campaigns of agitation, all of which contributed to the relinquishment of formal colonial control if not necessarily fundamental shifts of power. Furthermore, we now accept that decolonization was as much a force in the metropolis, on which most of this book is focused, as it was on the decolonizing countries themselves.

Visual culture, by contrast, is a different kind of concept, one rooted in academic debates and institutional shifts over the past twenty years involving such disciplines as art history, cultural and media studies, and sociology. Arguably as anachronistic to the period studied here—1945–70—as to imperial Rome or Ottoman Turkey, the concept has a certain usefulness. It legitimizes an eclectic variety of topics indifferent to divisions of high/low, amateur/professional, and handcrafted/industrially produced: from family snaps to Pathé documentaries; from the work of British, Caribbean, and Indian painters to American pro-Zionist films (stretching “Britain” to breaking point); from Festival of Britain logos to studio photographs of Afro-Caribbean workers in Birmingham; and from film and media images of colonial wars to the fragmentary archive of anticolonial pamphlet covers and leaflets. This inherently “soft” sense of visual culture can sometimes license the use of visual material simply to confirm an essentially textual argument.

The exhaustion of the war and postwar rationing were not good times to celebrate the decapitation of Britain from its colonial possessions; instead British official culture enacted an amnesia or at least a distancing of the country from its imperial past. In Jo Littler's chapter the Festival of Britain is presented as an event that reflected the contemporary “implosions” of empire: Festival culture negotiated the legacy by presenting a new rhetoric of benevolence, a drawing in of national parochialism, and a rhetoric of “discovery” instead of conquest. But this is to ignore the most physically evident and reproduced aspects of the Festival, its exhibition buildings, which evoked a more generous if hesitant internationalism. Appropriating Le Corbusier's Palace of the Soviets design, the Festival Hall's extensive foyer space was then a unique space in Britain, democratically open and free and, by extension, a preparation for the shedding of hierarchies of imperial imagery.

How Britain's role after independence was to be visualized is explored in Anandi Ramamurthy's chapter on Pathé films projecting Britain as a benevolent trustee providing technical expertise for modernization. Arguably, the audience here was crucial rather than the imagery itself. The same kinds of modernization were also desired by postcolonial leaders like Nkrumah and Nehru, who often turned to technical experts and companies from countries without the stain of previous imperialism. Pathé films might be placed beside, say, Paul Strand's Nkrumah-sponsored photographs of Ghana's Volta Dam, which show that such symbols of modernization were not just metaphors for “benevolent neo-colonial development” (57).

Simon Faulkner's chapter on John Minton's Caribbean paintings demonstrates the intersecting ways of perceiving Jamaica as colonial heterotopia, exotic tourist destination, and “lIbid. loci” and what these might imply for the humiliation of the population. Minton wrote about his sense of disquiet that colonial life was “crumbling” and “forever past” (90), and Faulkner searches for an equivalent in the paintings themselves, especially the thick impenetrable screens of tropical nature or the way that certain figures look back at the viewer. He is wisely tentative, concluding that the “unknowability” encoded in Minton's paintings is complementary to the “knowable worlds of the colonial and the touristic” (94).

By contrast, Leon Wainwright's chapter on Francis Newton Souza and Aubrey Williams is more problematic. Their paintings, which might be compared with contemporary negritude, sat comfortably under the pluralistic umbrella of modernism at the time. This was not regarded by many artists from colonial countries as “white modernism” (105) but signified a confident cosmopolitanism attempting to be free of narrowly national agendas. While applauding their transcendence of Caribbean, Indian, and European identities, Wainwright ignores the enabling modernist tropes of self-invention, inner struggle, and the discarding of what had been learnt in formal education. Seen as untainted by Europe, the art appears oddly unmediated, yielding up the “material deposit” of experiences of Britain and the “material flow” of movement between continents. Souza's Negro in Mourning (1957) is speculatively linked to racism in London, while its qualities as painting—its drips, phallic verticality, elements of caricature, and calligraphy—and their links with European painting related to existentialist philosophy and anticolonial politics, are neglected.

Patricia Holland and Emma Sandon develop a dialogue of perspectives onto Sandon's own archive of the years her family spent in postindependence Malawi. Various noises sound offstage as we peruse these serene photos: family divorce, developing tourism, independence ceremonies, and the fashioning of identities as technical elites. The key is the family's relation to Whiskey, the son of their servants, the friend of their children, and the object of later postcolonial guilt. The essay, for all its awkwardness, demonstrates how the private world of family memory is inextricably related to a concentric and abutting range of other worlds.

What we do not find in the collection is much of the “harder” end of visual culture theory, which argues that vision and visuality have their own histories and that there is a culture of the visual, semiautonomous and having its own traditions but also intricately related to social forces and thus needing its own distinctive methods of analysis. One could say that decolonization presents a different view of the way that the world is visually ordered, one that is hinted at in Bill Schwarz's typically elegant and suggestive afterword to this collection. Understanding the greater visibility of racial presence and the invisibility of decolonization in Britain will disturb all ways of seeing this period.