Description
It has become increasingly recognised that calling an event ‘complicated’ or ‘nuanced’ can be a device to disarm criticism of a particular atrocity. Focussing on the Culture War over the British Empire, I develop this insight further by analysing three implications of this exculpatory move. First, it is platitudinal and, ironically, functions to shed less analytical intricacy on the event. Second, I suggest that it is a move often deployed to reproduce power relations at the expense of activists, especially women of colour, who are then portrayed as ‘shrill’ or lacking nuance. Third, I argue that complexity being reserved for certain perpetrators but not others speaks to a racialised order where some actors are represented as multifaceted while others are two dimensional villains. I examine this through the prism of Gramsci’s notion of ‘common sense’ and his idea that such common-sense axioms are both reactionary and contradictory.
