Black Liverpool, Black America, and the Gendering of Diasporic Space

Abstract

The terms Liverpool and America, no less than African refer to racialized geographies of imagination. The mapping of racial signifiers onto geographical ones lends such terms illusion of referring to physical rather than social locations. That there is no actual space that one could call the African diaspora, despite how commonly it is mapped onto particular locales, points attention to ways that social spaces are constructed in tandem with processes of racial formation. Inspired by Paul Gilroy's first book, There Ain't No Black in Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (1987), I set out in 1991 to study meanings and practices surrounding race and nation in Liverpool, England. Set in a city with one of longest-settled populations in United Kingdom, my research investigated why and how identity is constituted as mutual opposite of English and British identities. Yet in pursuing these themes, I became increasingly amazed at how frequently my informants would make discursive forays into black America. Nested at key moments in their narratives were references to formative influence that America-in many forms-has had on racial identity and politics in their city. The experiences they narrated were varied, and narratives themselves were rich, poignant, and deeply gendered. Black Liverpudlians told of their relations with American servicemen (or GIs) who were stationed outside their city for some 25 years following World War II.1 Men and women also spoke about travels of their own African, Afro-Caribbean, and native Liverpudlian fathers who were employed as seamen by Liverpool shipping companies. The global wanderings of city's men often brought them to Atlantic ports of