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Paper short abstract:

The paper examines shifting regimes of value in a British child migration project to colonial Rhodesia. Focusing on shifts in affective state processes at specific political moments, the paper explores historically contextualized transformations in ideas of hope, value and future

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines a British child migration scheme - a project which sent and resettled select, white children from the UK to Southern Rhodesia between 1946 and 1962 - as an example for analyzing shifting regimes of value related to late colonial child migration. Regarded as "Imperial investments", the children were emigrated with the intention that their movement would both enable a better future for themselves, and secure the continuity and improvement of the racially segregated colonial regime. Considering migration as a symbol and an enactment of hope and faith in the future, as well as an act of despair and loss in the present (Pine 2014), the paper examines how ideas of hope, value and imaginings of future transform over the course of time. Locating the migrant children's histories into broader social and political formations and value regimes of which they are part, I focus on shifts in affective state processes at two specific historical moments and political contexts. I first consider the political and moral values at play in rationalizing and motivating the migration project as it was launched in the aftermath of the Second World War. Secondly, I examine the shifts in conceptions of what is good and morally desirable in a society at the moment of public denunciation of child migration in a state apology in 2010. From being represented as the embodiments of imperial hope and futurity, the child migrants are now depicted as symbols of loss and victims of failed and misguided state policies.