Editorial Introduction

In November 2004 Stuart Hall delivered the Raphael Samuel Memorial Lecture to a packed audience at London's Conway Hall. The lecture was the culmination of a day devoted to 'Black Diaspora Artists in Britain, Past and Present', organized by the Raphael Samuel History Centre at the University of East London, which had also featured multimedia presentations by three artists based at the University of East London – Roshini Kempadoo, Keith Piper and Faisal Abdu'allah – and a showing of Horace Ove's film, A Dream to Change the World. We here publish an edited transcript of Stuart Hall's lecture, accompanied by reproductions of some of the major artworks to which he refers.

The 'Black Diaspora Artists' event was co-sponsored by the Institute of International Visual Arts, which has recently published an important collection of essays, Shades of Black: Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain, reviewed below by Sandy Nairne, director of the National Portrait Gallery and a participant in the 2001 conference on which the volume is based.