Blackening Britain

Covering the period from the interwar years through the arrival of the steamship SS Empire Windrush from Jamaica in 1948 and culminating in the period of decolonization in the British Caribbean by the early 1970s, this project situates the development of networks of communication, categories of identification, and Caribbean radical politics both in the metropole and abroad. Blackening Britain explores how articulations of Caribbean identity formation corresponded to the following themes: organic collective action, political mobilization, cultural expressions of shared consciousness, and novel patterns of communication. Blackening Britain shows how colonial migrants developed tools of resistance in the imperial center predicated on their racialized consciousness that emerged from their experiences of alienation and discrimination in Britain. This book also interrogates the ways in which prominent West Indian activists, intellectuals, political actors, and artists conceived of their relationship to Britain. Ultimately, this work shows a move away from British identity and a radical, revolutionary consciousness rooted in the West Indian background and forged in the contentious space of metropolitan Britain.

The Dark Posthuman: Dehumanization, Technology, and the Atlantic World explores how liberal humanism first enlivened, racialized, and gendered global cartographies, and how memory, ancestry, expression, and other aspects of social identity founded in its theories and practices made for the advent of the category of the posthuman through the dimensions of cultural, geographic, political, social, and scientific classification. The posthuman is very much the product of world-building narratives that have their beginnings in the commercial franchise and are fundamentally rooted in science, governance, and economics around the hegemonic appropriation of environments and commodification of bodies that initially fuelled white settler life worlds and continue to be operational in the way we conceive of these worlds as continuous ontological formations. The want has always been for ownership of any of these dimensions of being without regard to condition, to not remain stranded as the subsidiary of another's being, to another's claim to humanity, and finally, to escape the suffocating confines of an instrumental ontology that suggests a subcategory of humanity without rights onto itself. The Dark Posthuman distinguishes the posthuman's place within both the liberal and neoliberal imaginary and reveals how its appearance first entrenched itself through the avarice of English settler colonialism, and subsequently, through the paranoia of American slavery. This same figure of the posthuman played a crucial role in the functional adaptation of Cold War behavioural cybernetics, and thereafter, in the fetishization of technology within the era of global financialization. The shadowing of this arrangement during and beyond the long duration of humanity's domination of this world becomes the structural web work of this book. Stephanie Polsky is an interdisciplinary writer and academic working in the areas of Media Studies and Visual Culture. Her work explores the confluence of power around race and gender as technologies of governance. She has lectured widely in media and cultural studies, critical theory, and visual culture at a number of prestigious institutions including Goldsmiths University, Regent's University London, University of Greenwich, and Winchester School of Art. Most recently she has worked at California College of the Arts in Critical Studies and Diversity Studies. She holds a PhD in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London and an MA in Media Studies from the University of Sussex. Her books include The End of the Future: Governing Consequence in the Age of Digital Sovereignty (Academica Press, 2019), Ignoble Displacement: Dispossessed Capital in Neo-Dickensian London (Zero Books, 2015), and Walter Benjamin's Transit: A Destructive Tour of Modernity (Academica Press, 2009).

Black and Asian Theatre in Britain is an unprecedented study tracing the history of ‘the Other’ through the ages in British theatre. The diverse and often contradictory aspects of this history are expertly drawn together to provide a detailed background to the work of African, Asian, and Caribbean diasporic companies and practitioners. Colin Chambers examines early forms of blackface and other representations in the sixteenth century, through to the emergence of black and Asian actors, companies, and theatre groups in their own right. Thorough analysis uncovers how they led to a flourishing of black and Asian voices in theatre at the turn of the twenty-first century. Figures and companies studied include: Ira Aldridge Henry Francis Downing Paul Robeson Errol John Mustapha Matura Dark and Light Theatre The Keskidee Centre Indian Art and Dramatic Society Temba Edric and Pearl Connor Tara Arts Yvonne Brewster Tamasha Talawa. Black and Asian Theatre in Britain is an enlightening and immensely readable resource and represents a major new study of theatre history and British history as a whole. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

For over 1500 years before the Empire Windrush docked on British shores, people of African descent have played a significant and far-ranging role in the country's history, from the African soldiers on Hadrian's Wall to the Black British intellectuals who made London a hub of radical, Pan-African ideas. But while there has been a growing interest in this history, there has been little recognition of the sheer breadth and diversity of the Black British experience, until now. This collection combines the latest work from both established and emerging scholars of Black British history. It spans the centuries from the first Black Britons to the latest African migrants, covering everything from Africans in Tudor England to the movement for reparations, and the never ending struggles against racism in between. An invaluable resource for both future scholarship and those looking for a useful introduction to Black British history, Black British History: New Perspectives has the potential to transform our understanding of Britain, and of its place in the world.

A classic history of the role of Black working-class struggles throughout the twentieth century In this pioneering history, Ron Ramdin traces the roots of Britain’s disadvantaged black working class. From the development of a small black presence in the sixteenth century, through the colonial labour institutions of slavery, indentureship, and trade unionism, Ramdin expertly guides us through the stages of creation for a UK minority whose origins are often overlooked. He examines the emergence of a black radical ideology underpinning twentieth-century struggles against unemployment, racial attacks and workplace inequality, and delves into the murky realms of employer and trade union racism. First published in 1987, this revised edition includes a new introduction reflecting on events over the past four decades.

`This is one of the most important books on race, representation and politics to come along in a decade.... Sarita Malik′s book is a brilliant contribution to the literature on race, cultural studies and public pedagogy′ - Henry Giroux, Penn State University Representing Black Britain offers a critical history of Black and Asian representation on British television from the earliest days of broadcasting to the present day. Working through programmes as wide-ranging as the early documentaries to `ethnic sitcoms′ and youth television, this book provides a detailed analysis of shifting institutional contexts, images of `race′ and ethnic-minority cultural politics in modern Britain. Representing Black Britain: focuses on issues of representation, ideology, `race′ and difference; covers a spectrum of television genres including documentary, news, comedy, light entertainment, youth television, drama, film and sport; examines the sociopolitical context of Black Britain; and looks at questions of policy and the institutional context of British broadcasting.