| Summary: | The thesis presented here constructs a challenge to our understanding of the society we live in. It confronts our capacity to revise and re-interpret our history in such a way as to obscure, if not eliminate, that which we deem inappropriate, uncomfortable, or expendable. It is further contended that this tendency to ahistoricism is a feature of official discourse. The state is complicit in the process and a principal architect of the structure of knowledge that imbues the process with authority. This thesis contributes to our knowledge and understanding of the discursive strategies of the state by creating a theoretical framework that facilitates the critical analysis of official documents. By locating the authors, their textual productions, and their readers in time and space, it becomes possible, as it were, to read between the lines and recognise the retum effect on domestic govemance of the technologies of domination developed abroad. The purpose here is not to liberate the subjugated knowledges of the welfare recipient, the immigrant, or the raCially oppressed, but 5 to critique the creativity of state power in producing, annexing, and eliminating identity within the context of the nation-state. Three documents have been selected as exemplars of the extent to which a colonising mentality, a way of understanding social relations born of colonial rule, continues to permeate social policy in both its formulation and documentation. The Scarman report (1981), the Griffiths report (1988), and the Macpherson report (1999) taken together articulate a post-modern thematic of difference. By focusing, as they do. on the Other within the body politic, these documents reveal a great deal about the Self that organises English social reality.
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