Humanitarianism

Abstract

This article argues that humanitarianism is a theme in the popular culture and politics of contemporary Britain which repays close analysis. Humanitarianism is identified as a strand of the ‘social imaginary’ through which conceptions of Britishness seek to understand the world and the place of Britain within it. Commitment to the social imaginary is secured through ‘group charisma’ which ties social subjects to it by means of assertions about the unique importance of the nation in the moral improvement of the world. This article identifies humanitarianism as a theme through which Britain deals with postcolonial melancholia and the problems of being an ‘old country’ marginalized in the present. The focus of the discussion is on two films: the cinema release Amazing Grace (2007) which focused on the 19th-century abolition of the slave trade and the broadcast film The Girl in the Café (2005) which was, in its turn, a romance about the eradication of world poverty. It is proposed that if these two films are subjected to cultural and social as opposed to textual analysis it is possible to explore why humanitarianism is so important to contemporary imaginations about — and commitments to — Britain.