Surfacing black and brown bodies in the digital archive: domestic workers in late nineteenth-century Australia

This paper examines the potential for the digital turn, particularly the extensive and ongoing digitisation of nineteenth-century newspapers, to enable scholars to rethink the experiences of individuals previously marginalised and hard to find in historical sources. The rapid digital turn in historical research has prompted scholars to argue for conversations in which to consider the implications of digital technologies in historical research practices. Yet in historical geography, though scholars work with and make digital data in a multitude of ways, there has been little formal reflection on the concerns, challenges or methodological opportunities presented by the formation of digital archives. To do so this paper takes as its focus ‘coloured’ workers employed in forms of domestic service at the end of the nineteenth century in Australia. Firstly, by resurfacing ‘coloured’ workers through their presence in newspaper advertisements the paper illustrates that digital methodologies enable the identification of individuals missed through previous forms of data analysis. Secondly, the paper seeks to illustrate how their reappearance can frame a rethinking of domestic labour and colonial identities, gender roles and the ethnic complexities of ‘coloured’ labour in the British Empire. The paper argues that though newspaper advertisements for employment are brief and impersonal, and their meanings, as mediated through form and time, are at times hard to decipher, gathering them together into a new archive supports a more complex reading of diversity across national, regional, local and imperial geographies

Reporting oppression: mapping racial prejudice in Anti-Caste and Fraternity, 1888-1895

This paper presents a close reading of the reports of racial oppression that appeared in issues of two periodicals, Anti-Caste and its successor Fraternity, between 1888 and 1895. Edited in Street, Somerset, these periodicals created an extensive political geographical imagination by mapping international cases of racial prejudice. Although critical of the British empire, neither Anti-Caste nor Fraternity demanded the destruction of the British empire. In a tactic similar to that used by early Pan-Africanists, the papers’ narratives desired an end to the expansion of the British empire and an increase in the respect for and conditions of those who were ruled ‘under the British Flag’. However, Anti-Caste’s focus upon racial inequality across the United States as well as the British empire enabled it to create a distinctive critique of racial prejudice across the English-speaking world. Its criticism of the imperial project combined with support for human brotherhood allowed the paper to develop a framework for debates on racial prejudice that drew together criticisms of labour laws in India, the removal of people from their lands in Southern Africa, the racial segregation of public transport in the United States and the restriction of Chinese labour in Australia

Geographies of belonging: White women and black history

This article discusses the need for, and possibilities of, writing integrated and multicultural histories of Britain by focusing on the relationships formed between white and black women in the workplace but primarily through their families. The article presents examples from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries which illustrate possibilities for examining integrated histories in urban and rural locations utilising ongoing research undertaken by community-based scholars. The article draws upon Hazel Carby's 1982 essay on the Boundaries of Sisterhood to make connections between critics of the making of women's history in the 1980s and the continuing need for black histories to be integrated into British history. © 2013 Caroline Bressey

Historical geography II: traces remain

The second report in this series turns to focus on the trace in relation to life-writing and biography in historical geography and beyond. Through attention to tracing journeys, located moments and listening to the presence of ghosts (Ogborn, 2005), this report seeks to highlight the range of different ways in which historical geographers have explored lives, deaths, and their transient traces through varied biographical terrains. Continuing to draw attention in historical geography to the darkest of histories, this piece will pivot on moments of discovering the dead to showcase the nuanced ways in which historical geography is opening doors into uncharted lives and unspoken histories

Historicising geographies of solidarity

This article evaluates two of the most productive recent areas of research in the historical geographies of solidarity: first, work relating to class and the labour movement; and second, debates clustered around race and colonialism. The two are, of course, not entirely distinct, and there has been much useful thinking at their intersections. I suggest that questions of mobility have been crucial in thinking about the formation of diverse solidarities across geographical and social boundaries. The article looks at how relationships can both be developed across differences of gender, race, and sexuality and how solidarities can be used to entrench forms of oppression and inequities of power. Thinking about this issue through the concept of intersectionality, I argue, would be a useful way of engaging with such questions. I suggest three areas which could be developed further. First, there is potential for a greater engagement with theoretical debates around the nature of solidarity itself. Second, historical geographers could pay more attention to the role of memory and “usable pasts.” Finally, I argue that more ambitious historical narratives, framed within wider social processes, would allow us to make broader arguments about how solidarity develops over time

Maritime labour, transnational political trajectories and decolonisation from below: the opposition to the 1935 British Shipping Assistance Act

This paper uses a discussion of struggles over attempts by the National Union of Seamen to exclude seafarers form the maritime labour market in the inter-war period to contribute todebates at the intersection of maritime spaces and transnational labour geographies (cf Balachandran, 2012, Hogsbjerg, 2013). Through a focus on struggles over the British Shipping Assistance Act of 1935 it explores some of the transnational dynamics through which racialized forms of trade unionism were contested. I argue that the political trajectories, solidarities and spaces of organising constructed through the alliances which were produced to oppose the effects of the Act shaped articulations of ‘decolonisation from below’ (James, 2015). Engaging with the political trajectories and activity of activists from organisaions like the Colonial Seamen’s Association can open up both new ways of understanding the spatial politics of decolonisation and new accounts of who or how such processes were articulated and contested. The paper concludes by arguing that engagement with these struggles can help assert the importance of forms of subaltern agency in shaping processes of decolonisation

The violent frontline: space, ethnicity and confronting the state in Edwardian Spitalfields and 1980s Brixton

This article discusses in comparative terms the relationship between space, ethnic identity, subaltern status and anti-state violence in twentieth century London. It does so by comparing two examples in which the control of the state, as represented by the Metropolitan Police, was challenged by minority groups through physical force. It will examine the Spitalfields riots of 1906, which began as strike action by predominantly Jewish bakers and escalated into a general confrontation between the local population and the police, and the Brixton riots of 1981, a response to endemic police harassment of mainly Caribbean youth and long-term economic discrimination in that area of South London. It will begin by dissecting the association of physical metropolitan space with the diasporic ‘other’ in the Edwardian East End and post-consensus South London, and how this ‘othering’ was influenced both by the state and the anti-migrant far right. It will then interrogate the difficult relationship between the Metropolitan Police and Jewish and Caribbean working class communities, and how this deteriorating relationship exploded into in extreme violence in 1906 and 1981. The article will conclude by assessing how the relationships between space, identity and violence influenced long-term national and communal narratives of Jewish and Caribbean interactions with the British state

Radical History Then and Now

In July 2016 the Radical Histories/Histories of Radicalism conference was held in London, commemorating twenty years since the death of Raphael Samuel and forty years since the founding of History Workshop Journal. In the opening plenary session I was one of the speakers asked to reflect upon the theme ‘Radical history then and now’. The conference came soon after the UK referendum on EU membership, preceded during the campaign by the use and misuse of immigrant histories, stories of belonging and not-belonging and charged debates about what it is to be British, and what Britain should be in the future. It was with these debates and conversations in mind that I reflected upon my past twenty years or so researching Black British Histories, particularly the lives of Black Victorian women in London. I had begun to do so because so little work was being undertaken when I began historical research as an undergraduate student, and in July 2016 it felt that despite positive, albeit limited, changes under New Labour governments were being successfully undermined by a resurgent political right. The piece below is a version of the thoughts I presented at the conference

Staging race: Florence Mills, celebrity, identity and performance in 1920s Britain

This article focuses on the time the African American performer Florence Mills spent in Britain in the 1920s. Mills was one of the most popular performers of the period, taking a lead in African American vaudeville productions, she was admired by working class and ‘elite’ black and white audiences. Our paper examines four examples of Mills’ British fan mail alongside newspaper reports of her performances in London. These reveal complex themes of identity, of Britishness, sexuality, gender and class within the context of changing international understandings of race relations in the Inter-war period. We utilise these letters alongside newspaper reports to consider how Mills’ presence in Britain as a performer and anti-racist activist influenced debates and personal reflections on racial identity, sexual desire and belonging to Britain