Teaching Twentieth-Century Black Britain

Abstract

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 speak-