La famiglia postcoloniale? Bambini dell’Africa Occidentale, affidamento privato e Stato britannico

In her article, Bailkin is interested in the embodied presences of empire in the case files and records of the post-war welfare state. She sets out to interrogate the history of decolonization and the strict correlation with families’ lives. She wonders also how the new social sciences provided modern modes of interaction between the state and different migrant groups in Great Bretain. Her attention in this article concerns African immigrant students from Nigeria and Ghana and his/her family (when their wifes or husbands and children were in Britain too).
Bailkin uses archives from various government departments, newspaper reports, and individual life stories to unpack the ways in which new migrant subjects were constituted and pathologised. Concerning the fostering and/or adoption of African children into English White homes Bailkin points out the profound consequences for generations of black families, as well the criteria by which all families in Britain were evaluated as “good” or “bad” ones.