trajectory between two islands, the legacies of which, at a specific time and space, this book seeks to understand.63
Honing in on black Handsworth is an approach that, in also drawing on the field of microhistory, allows us to see the complexities of community formation in the long 1980s in “microscopic detail,” foreground the activities of a range of previously marginalized actors, and place them alongside prominent figures such as Hall at the center of the historical narrative.64 If Handsworth was in many ways exceptional, it also existed as part of what had by the 1980s become a well-established, interlinked network of black localities throughout Britain. For example, its sound systems and cricket teams competed against similar outfits from Leicester, London, Nottingham, and elsewhere; its political organizations shared platforms with like-minded groups from across the country and took part in many of the same campaigns; and its artists attended each other’s exhibition openings and film screenings and often sought to use their work to address many of the same issues. If the focus on black Handsworth casts light on these translocal dynamics, a microhistorical approach can, as Lara Putnam has suggested, paradoxically also contribute to a better understanding of how transnationalism and diasporas operate in practice: of how ideas and social networks move across oceans and national borders; the diverse ways in which they are utilized and experienced by people in their day-to-day lives; and how they impact life in a particular locale as new political programs are implemented, artwork is created, and social institutions are established.65 This book testifies to the enduring significance of the black globality in the ambiguous context of postcolonial Britain. In this respect, as the effects of immigration were playing out in Britain in a radically altered geopolitical climate, what follows might also be seen as part of an emergent, far larger historical project to understand how late twentieth-century globalization was experienced, but also shaped, at the national, regional, and micro levels.66
Black Handsworth begins by demonstrating the ways in which the black globality was used by Handsworth’s political organizations as a means of framing the struggles they waged locally over issues such as a culturally insensitive education system, a lack of adequate housing, and the passing of ever-more-restrictive immigration controls. This perspective, “lodged between the local and the global,” for some organizations formed the basis of a strategically inclusive politics that emphasized the shared trajectories of Handsworth’s African Caribbean and South Asian populations: both a historic relationship to British colonialism and the mutual attempts at navigating the effects of what was understood as a form of neocolonialism in contemporary Britain.67 But as these global perspectives played out in the locale, chapter 1 suggests, this notionally inclusive “black” political platform was beginning to break down. Activists increasingly saw their role in Handsworth as committed social workers, as well as, more conventionally, lobbyists and political campaigners. In wanting to develop practical responses to the many inequalities that were faced by their constituents, however, many often found this necessitated ethnically tailored responses. To some extent, as women activists fought to gain recognition of the particular position black and Asian women were in, this is in keeping with the familiar narrative of the fragmentation of new social movements and the concurrent rise of identity politics. However, as subsequent chapters make clear, this is also a story about the growing importance within African Caribbean communities of a specific reading of the black globality and the reemergence—culturally, as well as politically—of a Pan-Africanist frame of reference.
Chapter 2 moves from the domain of formal politics to the politics of representation in the context of the ongoing moral panic around the supposedly violent, insurrectional threat posed by the black inner city and the parallel emergence of a nationwide black arts scene developed by practitioners from within neighborhoods like Handsworth. Focusing specifically on the visual arts, the chapter shows how local artists were engaged in a dual project to, on the one hand, undermine the images of rioting, violence, and conflict that had come to define the black inner city in the popular imaginary, and, on the other hand, contribute to an expanded archive of the development of postcolonial Britain. For some practitioners—such as the London-based filmmakers the Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC), whose 1986 documentary Handsworth Songs marked a key intervention in Handsworth’s visual cultures—this meant seeking to connect contemporary race relations discourse with the legacies of colonialism in order to disrupt the widespread social and political disavowal of Britain’s imperial past. For others, such as the documentary photographer Vanley Burke, it meant a quasi-anthropological ambition to record a more community-oriented formation and the political marches, reggae concerts, street styles, pubs, churches, and other institutions that testified to the establishment and evolution of black Handsworth. In both cases, there could often be a tension between the desire to present an ostensibly authentic image of postcolonial Britain and the perennial appearance in artists’ work of images that could conform to the stereotypes commonly found in the pages of tabloid newspapers. Nevertheless, taken together, this body of work is seen as forming part of a shared political project, one that constitutes an alternative, if at times problematic, visual cartography of a black locality—one that in many ways the remainder of this book sets out to understand.68
The final two chapters interrogate Handsworth’s everyday social life and the presence of the diasporan consciousness within it. They traverse contrasting diasporic routes, in which the emphasis shifts from the figure of Africa and specifically Ethiopia in chapter 3 to, in the final chapter, the invocation of Caribbean symbolism and patterns of sociability. Chapter 3 charts the reemergence—more than four decades after London had become a hotbed of Pan-African political organization—of more general, cultural, and social iterations of a Pan-Africanist outlook. Prompted by the transatlantic crossing of Rastafarianism via Jamaican reggae music, this was manifest in a diverse range of settings, from theater and dance groups and the work of reggae bands and “dub poets,” to the prominence of a Rastafarian style and a related subculture that revolved around sound system events. In this often masculine milieu, African and Ethiopian imagery contributed to an imagined transnational community that helped a young black generation in particular to enact a powerful reappropriation of blackness and, in so doing, negotiate the inequalities they encountered in the context of 1980s Britain. Chapter 4, with its emphasis on the case studies of a cricket club, pubs, churches, and the home, enters into the most quotidian elements of everyday life. It finds that for the older generations that largely occupied these spaces, the practices that took place inside were a means of evoking their previous lives in the Caribbean: for example, the adoption of what was seen as a specifically West Indian style of cricket; the centrality of the pub game dominoes; the importance attached to a specific style of religious worship; and, entering into the domestic sphere, a particular aesthetic in which the front room functioned, for women in particular, as a key signifier of status and cultural capital. The sociability inside these spaces gets at the enduring ambiguities of the Caribbean inheritance: the lingering, lived presence of a Victorian colonial ethos, an aspirational desire for respectability in Britain, and—signaling a move from an imagined community to an emotional one—an affective attachment to life in the Caribbean. Having unequivocally moved from the status of sojourners to settlers, Britain’s black population continued to look out across the black globality. In so doing, they were establishing this particular diasporic formation as an assertive presence in the one-time mother country.
There are certainly absences in this story and areas that warrant a more detailed exploration than Black Handsworth can provide. For example, while chapter 1 deals with the alternative, “supplementary” schools that were set up by black activists in response to the ethnocentricity of the mainstream curriculum, more historical work is required to trace the long-term effects of inequalities in schooling and the impact of the “multicultural” reforms that were gradually introduced from the mid-1970s onward.69 Likewise, the issue of employment—so central to narratives of postwar migration and, in a different way, to understandings of the effects of the fracturing of the postwar political consensus in Britain—needs to be more fully examined in relation to black communities. This not only includes the ongoing demands for trade unions to seriously mobilize
