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

Writing History: Thinking Beyond the Past in the Present

As a collaborative work that reflects on Stuart Hall’s early life in colonial Jamaica and his experience of the transitions that shaped the making of postcolonial Britain, Familiar Stranger offers a number of provocations about the meaning and methods of history and their relationship to present. This essay explores how both the form and key themes of the text provide a generative space to think critically about approaches to historical writing. Likewise, it examines how Familiar Stranger offers a means of conceptualizing the relationship between histories of Britain’s racialized colonial past and its afterlives in the present. Keywords: Race; (Post)Coloniality; Archive; Black Britai

Black Britain and the Politics of Race in the Twentieth Century

Open access articleThis essay examines a growing literature on postcolonial Black Britain that seeks to suture the ties between prewar and postwar histories of Black political activity in Britain. By examining how people of African descent articulated the political conditions of being Black in metropolitan Britain during the 20th century, recent studies have shown how non-state actors shaped ideas about the relationship between race and citizenship. In unearthing the myriad of ways that people of African descent navigated the politics of being both Black and British, this body of work has begun to offer critical perspectives on postcolonial Black Britain’s place within the political history of the African Diaspora. Moreover, this essay argues that new work on Black Britain and the politics of race yields fruitful ground for dismantling some of the artificial historiographical partitions that have oftentimes separated metropolitan race politics in the postwar era from the broader history of empire, decolonization, and transnational anti-racist movements organized around the pursuit of Black freedom

The Temporal Dimensions of Thinking Black

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.This commentary was delivered at the 2019 Historical Research/Wiley Lecture at Queen Mary University of London on 6 June 2019. It was followed by a conversation with Rob Waters

U.S. Negroes, Your Fight is Our Fight: Black Britons and the 1963 March on Washington

This essay examines the diasporic character the 1963 March on Washington movement for Jobs and Freedom in Britain. In the months leading up to the march Black British activists and intellectuals closely followed events in Alabama, Mississippi and in towns and cities throughout the South as Black Americans organized sit-ins, boycotts, marches and other forms of mass protest demanding the rights of full citizenship guaranteed to them by the U.S. constitution. In addition to bearing witness to the struggles of Black Americans, Black Britons collectively organized in solidarity with the Black freedom movement in America and invoked the iconography and rhetoric of American racial (in)justice to articulate the dynamics shaping the local politics of race Britain. In doing so, I argue that by organizing events like the London solidarity march, Black Britons transformed the 1963 March on Washington into a type of discursive capital that wielded a powerful story about race, citizenship and the dilemmas of blackness that transcended the boundaries of the American nation and engendered the relations which constitute the (re)making of diaspora

London Is The Place For Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race

London Is The Place for Me explores how Afro-Caribbean migrants navigated the politics of race and citizenship in Britain and reconfigured the boundaries of what it meant to be both Black and British at a critical juncture in the history of Empire and twentieth century transnational race politics. The book situates their experience within a broader context of Black imperial and diasporic political participation, and examines the pushback-both legal and physical-that the migrants' presence provoked

Locating Black British women in the archive, creating spaces for Black British women in the nation

Round table discussion

Marking Race

This essay sets out a series of proposals regarding how the history of race in late-twentieth-century Britain is understood. The authors seek to expand the frame for discussions of race in this era beyond the history of the New Right, migration controls, and Black Power. Borrowing Omi and Winant’s concept of ‘racial formation’, the authors point to the multiple racial projects operative in late-twentieth-century Britain, and connecting it up to a global imperial and post-imperial geography. Their discussion encompasses issues of structural change and economic management, labour rights, social provision and social control, and political representation. It engages many of the key areas of debate currently driving the research agenda of historians of modern Britain