Search Results

In this final chapter, late modernism’s outward turn captures the changes in political belonging wrought by the twin phenomena of decolonization and mass migration from the Caribbean to British shores.

An analysis of The Emigrants, The Final Passage, and Small Island, chapter 4 brings together this book’s arguments by exploring the relationship among diasporic, imperial, and national identity formations in George Lamming’s, Caryl Phillips’s, and Andrea Levy’s novels about West Indian immigrants (who are both African Caribbean diasporans and subjects of the British empire) settling in Britain after World War II. Lamming and Phillips—members, respectively, of the first and second generations of post-Windrush writers—convey a Middle Passage sensibility more powerfully than does Levy, who, in the generational classification of post-Windrush novelists, belongs to the third generation. Like The Emigrants and Final Passage, Small Island, too, underscores the antiblack racism experienced by black Caribbean migrants to Britain. Yet exilic melancholy, though a presence, does not dominate Small Island in the way it controls Lamming’s and Phillips’s writing. In Levy’s treatment, the story of the postwar black Caribbean diaspora in Britain grows into a narrative of active diaspora-making. Finally, the chapter also examines how each of these three authors portrays the gendered aspects of the postwar Caribbean migration to Britain.

Tracing the black presence in Liverpool, the oldest black community in Europe, is the subject of this chapter by Ray Costello. He begins by recounting and dispelling the ‘Windrush myth’—a misconception that the arrival of nearly 500 Jamaican workers on the SS Empire Windrush in 1948 was the beginning of the history of black settlers in Britain. Instead, black communities had existed in Britain for at least five centuries with Liverpool having the most continuous presence including enslaved black servants, freed slaves, sailors, children of African royalty attending school, and free Black Loyalists from the Americas. Costello describes the diverse backgrounds, cultures and languages of black settlers in Liverpool following each of Britain’s wars which obscured the true age of the community and perpetuated a view of local blacks as exotic foreigners. The failure to recognize the age and Britishness of an established black Liverpudlian population, Costello fears, preserves a belief in the recency of black immigration promotes the idea that assimilation and acculturation are the keys to integration and racial equity.

The black British press has since its inception in 1900 been rooted in several connected struggles. They are: the push for African and Caribbean independence, and the creation of a collective cultural and political black identity based in African roots; the formation of community and belonging for largely Caribbean immigrants following the post-World War II mass migration, and the reflection and reinforcement of identity for black British-born citizens outside of white political, social, economic and cultural hegemony. However, it has not only played a pivotal role in addressing issues of liberation and community building, but also in helping to define the public discourse surrounding the definition of what it means to be both black and British, not just for blacks, but for the entire British society. This chapter examines the history of black British newspapers and periodicals through these three distinct periods of social change and the critical role they have played in each of them.

This chapter discusses the emigration of West Indians after the Second World War. It describes the arrival of black West Indians, generalised as Jamaicans, aboard the Empire Windrush to Britain in 1948. The chapter explores the significance of the migrant journeys of the West Indians, the beginning of black presence in Britain and the contributions of the migrants to the nation's chronological evolution.

When Lord Kitchener proclaimed, “London is the place for me” as he exited the SS Empire Windrush, he did so at a critical juncture in the global and diasporic history of race politics in Britain and the African Diaspora. This introduction reimagines the landing of the Windrush as a historical guidepost linking the political experiences of people of African descent in the Empire and those within the confines of the imperial metropolis. The introduction outlines elements of the broader historical context shaping histories of Afro-Caribbean migration to Britain and the attendant questions about race, citizenship, and Black Britishness that these movements prompted during the postwar era. This book argues that Black Britons actively shaped debates about race and citizenship in Britain. Moreover, it situates postwar race politics in Britain within a larger transnational historiography about Black political activity and struggles for citizenship within the African Diaspora in the twentieth century.

The introduction opens by situating the book in contemporary debates on religion, immigration, and integration in Western Europe. The “Muslim question” that underlies many of these debates can be deeply troubling, yet it is also unanswerable. The introduction proposes moving beyond the Muslim question to the more tangible and forward-looking “civic question”: what kinds of citizens are immigrants and their descendants becoming? With this question in place as core to the book, the introduction then proceeds to explain the research that was conducted with second-generation young people in London. The two groups studied—young Jamaicans in Brixton and young Bengalis in the East End—are described in turn. Brief histories are provided of post-Windrush immigration, settlement, and politics in Brixton and the East End. The introduction succinctly explains the research methods of the study. It ends with a brief outline of the content of each chapter in the book.

The end of the war saw many departures from Britain—troops were demobbed and refugees returned. But in the aftermath of war, the population in Britain remained more diverse than it had been before 1939. Government schemes generated many post-war arrivals through the recruitment of workers, mainly from Europe. Many of those who stayed on or returned remember a change of climate in the aftermath of war—to a more hostile one, their wartime contributions forgotten. Such forgetting is apparent also in cultural memories disseminated in British cinema and other media. The celebration of an ‘allies’ war’ was for the duration of the war only—the images and sounds of allies, which had been so prominent in wartime Britain, faded rapidly when the war was over. In public memories, many groups who contributed to the Allied war effort were forgotten, not only in Britain, but also in their own countries.

Black Jamaican singer Millie Small’s “My Boy Lollipop” was one of the first global pop hits with origins in Jamaican pop music. British commentators caricatured Small’s Jamaican background while construing her as the ideal ambassador to bring Jamaican pop to white British audiences. This chapter listens to Millie Small’s voice in this context. Despite attempts to diminish her accent, Small’s distinctive voice proved difficult to discipline and its reception reveals how ideas about sonic femininity collide with racist anxiety. The chapter closely attends to the way she sings “My Boy Lollipop,” and the way that Black and white audiences responded to her voice. It then discusses her performance on the iconic Around the Beatles TV special, which allows us to hear her voice in the context of competing discourses of modernity. The chapter concludes by reflecting on one of Small’s later recordings—the antiracist anthem “Enoch Power.”

This chapter places the work of immigration officers within the broader politics of immigration in the UK. Front-line staff operate in a charged and polarizing environment, and are required to traverse this complex political arena in their daily shifts. Their work is laid open to politics in their daily work like no other area of government. Against the background of the Brexit vote, the chapter traces the growing salience of immigration in contemporary politics and the damaging effects of its electoral games in post-colonial Britain. Although such games have paid electoral dividends in the short term, they have also destroyed livelihoods. As if these games came full circle with the Windrush scandal, they had toxic institutional reverberations. The ambivalent and almost neurotic politics of immigration and its control which stirs imperial melancholia and profits from racialized public fears and anxieties, while shielding border work from view, brutalizes and demoralizes officers and tarnishes the department’s fragile legitimacy. It renders their everyday work hostage to the vagaries of politics and exposes them to the consequences of bad choices. As the chapter shows, immigration officers work to fulfil a fantasy, that of complete and perfect security, and bear the brunt of its disenchantments.

Omar Khan was one of the campaigners who brought the Windrush scandal to the nation’s attention. This interview considers what lessons it might have for how racism and discrimination are viewed in the United Kingdom and what this might indicate about the value of freedom. The interview starts with an overview of Windrush, the history that led to that point, and how it was allowed to happen. Khan argues that the episode shows clearly that discrimination is not simply a matter of a few bad actors, but a systemic problem rooted in our history. Such discrimination is not merely unfair, or unjust, it is also a threat to our freedom: it constrains the choices people are able to make, how they are able to live their lives. The chapter ends with a consideration of how we might address racism, and what a truly free society would look like.