Teaching Twentieth-Century Black Britain

My interest in teaching black Britain took shape through a circuitous route. When I was a newly minted doctor in modern British history in the early 1990s, the subject simply did not exist—at least in terms of the semiotics of prestige in the U.S. academy. It lacked the usual panoply of graduate seminars, national and international conferences, and book series sponsored by the leading university presses. What immediately inspired me to create a course on twentieth-century black Britain was my participation in the creation of the African American Studies Program at UC Irvine. Not surprisingly, the exploration of communities and cultures of the African diasporas over time and space faced resistance from many quarters. Still, the struggle spurred me to interrogate my own principal field about the black presence in the British past.

As a social and cultural historian, I began with a predictable set of questions. What pushed and/or pulled Afro-Caribbeans, West and East Africans, and South Asians to Britain? How many did they number in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? Where did they live—in cities or in the countryside—and for how long? In isolation or among the dominant communities? In what ways was their presence sanctioned, contested, and represented? Did they possess a sense of identity as black or British? What were their interior lives like? Edward Scobie's Black Britannia (1972), James Walvin's Black and White: The Negro and English Society, 1555-1945 (1973), and Folarin Shyllon's Black People in Britain, 1555-1833 (1977) provided a good starting point. ¹ I supplemented my courses on modern Britain with these and other sources. As others incorporated women's history into narratives of the nation, I added the histories of black people to the master narrative and, figuratively speaking, stirred. Even then, I was not satisfied with this approach; and I imagine that the students saw it for what it was: a supplement. So I decided to create a new course, one that explicitly foregrounded the question of race, nation, and identity. To this end, I began to map Britain as very much embedded in an imperial landscape, one that defined the boundaries of the nation and belonging before and after decolonization in the twentieth century.

Framing imperialism as a dialectical process was crucial to rendering the liminality of blackness for African and Asian people in Britain. Until the 1980s, imperialism was largely understood as an activity that took place beyond the borders of the archipelago. The empire certainly marked an extension of Britain's territorial borders. As the peopling of South Asians and Afro-Caribbeans in Britain amply reveal, imperialism shaped the metropole as well. Ayahs, Lascars, and Princes:Indians in Britain (1986) by Rozina Visram and Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984) by Peter Fryer provided crisp and clear texts that accessibly located South Asians and Afro-Caribbeans in relation to the transatlantic slave trade and West Indian slavery and to the shift in rule from the East India Company to the crown after the 1858 mutiny. ²

Students seemed particularly struck by the visibility of blackness in liberal humanitarian discourses about colonial subjects and the invisibility of black people domestically. As the groundbreaking work by Antoinette Burton on imperialism and the women's movement demonstrates, liberal activists advanced their domestic agenda, that is, voting rights for women, by defining the nation in relationship to making subject populations into their own image. ³ This discourse simultaneously raced the nation as white, while stamping black people in Britain as inherently alien.

Until the mid-twentieth century, the black presence in Britain remained well below 20,000. Given their contingent relationship to the metropole—as slaves, servants, seamen, soldiers, and students—this was not surprising. On the whole, males were overrepresented relative to females, but all operated on the margins of society. Those who prolonged their stay remained tied to their homelands as much by the mail service as by the barriers...