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

The City of Others: Photographs from the City of London Asylum Archive

This photographic essay presents images from the City of London Asylum archive as a example of how the visual can be used to expand our investigations of social histories of Victorian London, particularly the multi-cultural nature of the city. The essay argues that images are an essential part of the research process, but also discusses some of the disadvantages and ethical tensions encountered through the use of such portraits for historical recovery. Despite these caveats, the paper concludes that we have much to learn from the images that present images of the city that would otherwise be difficult, if not impossible, for twenty-first-century researchers to access

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

Invisible Presence: The Whitening of the Black Community in the Historical Imagination of British Archives

The aim of this paper is to highlight the methods and ironies of researching Black histories in a British context. It is an attempt to expose tensions between the presence of Black people in London, their material presence in the archives available to researchers, and the complexities of British histories that their presence articulates. RÉSUMÉLe but de ce texte est de mettre en évidence les méthodes et les ironies de la recherche des histoires noires dans un contexte britannique. Il tente d’exposer les tensions entre la présence des personnes de race noire à Londres, leur présence matérielle dans les archives disponibles pour les chercheurs, et les complexités des histoires britanniques dans lesquelles leur présence est exprimée

Forgotten geographies Historical geographies of black women in Victorian and Edwardian London

Includes bibliographical referencesAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:DX222376 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo

Feminist historical geographies: doing and being

As part of GPC’s 25-year anniversary celebrations, this article explores possibilities and prospects for feminist historical geographies and geographers. Here I define feminist historical geography as scholarship which asks geographical questions of historical material and is informed by feminist theories, approaches and methodologies. Its empirical subject matter is necessarily expansive and diverse, but often has a particular focus on the lives of women and other marginalized groups, and on the ways gender and space were co-constituted. This essay interrogates recent developments within this broad terrain, specifically articles and books published in the period from around 2000 onwards and either appearing in geography journals or written by those self-identifying as geographers. The main exception is work by historians and archaeologists interested in gender, space and place, which is cited here in an attempt to open up new research directions for feminist historical geographers. In what follows, we shuttle across spaces and between scales, roaming from the sites of empire to the intimate geographies of the home, from landscapes and buildings to personal possessions like clothes and letters. Doing so is a deliberate act intended both to demonstrate the liveliness of feminist historical geographies broadly conceived and to counter hierarchical readings of space, society and history with their inherent danger of privileging the public over the private, and the exceptional over the everyday and mundane