Thinking Black: Britain, 1964-1985. By Rob Waters

Abstract

The last decade has witnessed an exponential growth in scholarship on Black Power, challenging conventional interpretations of the movement. A key hallmark of this revisionist work has been the spatial turn toward what Nico Slate has called a “global history of Black Power.” Moving beyond the movement’s origins in the United States, scholars now emphasize the global terrain on which Black Power operated as well as how international networks of activists and ideas informed struggles across North America, the Caribbean, Asia, Europe, and the Pacific. In Thinking Black, historian Rob Waters makes a vital contribution to this field, examining how activists and intellectuals in Britain navigated these transnational webs of black politics during the late twentieth century. In so doing, Waters builds on the nascent literature on Black Power in Britain, in which scholars are working to recover that movement’s distinctive origins, character, and legacy. While much of this scholarship has focused on the “organized politics of Black Power,” Waters takes a more expansive approach examining the relationship between black radical political formations and what he describes as “a wider political culture [of] thinking black” (225). Waters traces the development of this political culture and its varied articulations across five chapters employing an impressive array of sources drawn from repositories—such as the Black Cultural Archives, the George Padmore Institute, and the Institute of Race Relations—with deep roots in this history, representing just one of Black Power’s many overlooked legacies in Britain.