'Claudia Jones and the West Indian Gazette': Reflections on the Emergence of Post-colonial Britain

Abstract

This chapter uncovers a whole world of half-forgotten ideas and activities seemingly a small world, but one with huge implications for national, imperial and postcolonial histories. As readers will know, postcolonial theory was often theory-with-a-vengeance, locked into the kind of abstraction which is inimical to historical thought. Translating these concerns into a properly historiographical mode, as the notion postcolonial Britain requires, has proved the source of much dispute. The movement of vernacular musics from the West Indies to Britain – most especially of Trinidadian calypso and of ska, the specifically Jamaican rendition of rhythm and blues – proved to be of historic significance, creating within Britain a new syncretic culture. Lamming poses this in a manner which domestic critics of cultural hierarchies at that time did not: in terms of colonialism.