‘Time come’: Britain's black futures past

Abstract

Abstract Drawing on the research for my book Thinking Black: Britain, 1964–85, this article, given as the 2019 Historical Research/Wiley lecture, unpacks the sense of impending change in black political cultures of the long nineteen-seventies, and analyses how black politics worked to carve out new historical subjects. I show how, for those who sought to build new black futures in this moment, imagining these futures meant bringing past experiences of slavery and colonialism into the present as unfinished histories that would be a driving force of change for Britain.