Popular Postcolonialisms

Discourses of Empire and Popular Culture

Nadia Atia, Kate Houlden, Nadia Atia, Kate Houlden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317299011
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Drawing together the insights of postcolonial scholarship and cultural studies, Popular Postcolonialisms questions the place of 'the popular' in the postcolonial paradigm. Multidisciplinary in focus, this collection explores the extent to which popular forms are infused with colonial logics, and whether they can be employed by those advocating for change. It considers a range of fiction, film, and non-hegemonic cultural forms, engaging with topics such as environmental change, language activism, and cultural imperialism alongside analysis of figures like Tarzan and Frankenstein. Building on the work of cultural theorists, it asks whether the popular is actually where elite conceptions of the world may best be challenged. It also addresses middlebrow cultural production, which has tended to be seen as antithetical to radical traditions, asking whether this might, in fact, form an unlikely realm from which to question, critique, or challenge colonial tropes. Examining the ways in which the imprint of colonial history is in evidence (interrogated, mythologized or sublimated) within popular cultural production, this book raises a series of speculative questions exploring the interrelation of the popular and the postcolonial.

Part I
The Radical Popular

1 ‘Welcome to The University of Brixton’

BBC Radio and the West Indian Everyday

Rachael Gilmour

On 12th January 1971, less than a year after it first started broadcasting, British Broadcasting Corporation (hereafter BBC) Radio London began airing a new comedy drama serial, devised in collaboration with the BBC’s English by Radio unit. The University of Brixton, set in Brixton’s West Indian community and dramatising the everyday goings-on of the Plummer household, was aimed at teaching immigrants from the Caribbean to speak ‘Standard English’; each episode began with the announcement ‘Welcome to the University of Brixton. You won’t get degrees or diplomas here, but you can get a first-class education.’¹ Though now largely forgotten, the 26-part series may justifiably be seen as one of BBC local radio’s successes of the early 1970s. Its popularity saw it repeated on Radio London the following year as well as broadcast in other English cities with sizeable West Indian populations: Birmingham, Bristol, Oxford, Manchester, Derby and Leeds.² The series was also syndicated to seven radio stations in the Caribbean as well as stations in the United States: in Massachusetts and across the Eastern Pacific Radio Network.³ Representations of and programming for black and minority ethnic audiences on British radio have not received the same kind of scholarly attention as film and television in this period.⁴ Yet radio – and, in particular, local radio – was central to the BBC’s efforts to provide dedicated programming for Britain’s immigrant communities in the late 1960s and 1970s, and what few programmes the BBC did produce were capable of attracting large numbers of listeners.⁵ The University of Brixton illuminates the BBC’s strategic emphasis on teaching ‘Standard English’ and educating for citizenship through domestic programming for ethnic minority listeners in this period. The programme sees the Corporation acting to promote linguistic and cultural integration as a means to serve the West Indian community’s needs – as it saw them – in a time of crisis. The programme emerges out of, and itself dramatises, a complex negotiation between the BBC’s normative protocols and burgeoning notions of West Indian cultural distinctiveness, while its self-conscious agenda of integration operates both in recognition and in denial of the era’s incendiary racial politics.⁶ Written and broadcast less than two years after the watershed of 1968 and Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, the series makes a decisive intervention by casting West Indians as central to the emphatically local, everyday life of Brixton in a largely frictionless blending of Caribbean and British cultures, a move made possible by recourse to the popular fictional forms of the soap opera and radio comedy drama. Framed around the teaching of ‘Standard English,’ as well as the legitimisation of state institutions and procedures (the police, the legal system, employment law, education), the series appealed to the sensibilities of that first generation of West Indian migrants for whom connection to British culture was deeply felt.⁷ Yet its storylines – aimed, albeit in a lightly comic vein, at the pressing issues of the day – obliquely engage all sorts of contemporary debates within the West Indian community around the politics of language and culture, and of West Indian and British belonging, in a period of rapid cultural and political change. Thus for all its light-heartedness, and indeed in many ways its downright oddness, at the heart of The University of Brixton lies a complex push-and-pull between elite, popular and vernacular cultural forms, and between various kinds of ‘containment and resistance,’ in Stuart Hall’s terms, via a fictionalised version of the day-to-day goings-on of West Indian life in South London in the early 1970s.⁸

Immigrants from the ‘new Commonwealth’ had been arriving in Britain in sizeable numbers since the late 1940s, but it was not until the 1960s that the BBC began to take seriously the issue of broadcasting for ethnic minorities. Conceived very much under the aegis of educational programming, the Corporation’s de facto assumption from the outset was that, as a public service broadcaster, its programming for minority groups should revolve around teaching the English language, British culture and citizenship. In 1965, two BBC conferences were held with representatives of the Indian, Pakistani and West Indian communities in Britain to solicit feedback on broadcasting.⁹ Representatives from the Indian and Pakistani communities responded warmly to proposals for dedicated programming geared to language learning and advice around British culture and institutions. Shortly thereafter, a new weekly magazine programme devised along these lines, Make Yourself At Home, broadcast primarily in ‘Hindustani’ (in ‘the basic vocabulary common to both Hindi and Urdu’ and therefore aimed notionally at both Indian and Pakistani audiences), was first aired on radio and television.¹⁰ Each programme included discussion, answers to listeners’ questions about life in Britain, music from Indian and Pakistani films, and a short English lesson, prepared by the BBC’s English by Radio unit, which featured a storyline of new immigrants, Mr and Mrs Chaudhury, ‘making their first attempts at speaking English in shops, in buses, at railway stations, or in telephone kiosks.’¹¹ Representatives of West Indian community organisations at the 1965 Conference, by contrast, were largely resistant to the notion of separate programming. Colonially educated and English-speaking participants were clear that there was no need for programming designed to help West Indians to adapt linguistically or culturally to life in Britain. They were keen to emphasise instead the need for programmes for mainstream audiences that were about the Caribbean and reflected its connections to Britain through the histories of slavery and colonisation, and, above all, for normalised representations of West Indians as part of everyday life in Britain.¹²

The question of programming for ethnic minorities was reopened by the launch, in the late 1960s, of a series of new local radio stations as the newly developed FM radio frequency allowed radio broadcasting to be diversified and localised for the first time. Local radio, able to target urban communities with relatively large immigrant populations, provided the Corporation with new, directed means to fulfil its remit as a public service broadcaster, to ‘provide a comprehensive service meeting the needs of minorities as well as majorities.’¹³ The focus continued to lie with the requirements of Britain’s South Asian communities and specifically on language teaching; but there was renewed attention too to the perceived needs of West Indian listeners. At a time when mainstream discourses around race and immigration were swinging decisively to the right, approaches to programming for immigrant communities were underpinned by a sense that the BBC should serve as a force for integration – although at the same time, the Corporation was highly conscious of needing to avoid fuelling the impression that public service broadcasting was being usurped by the needs of minorities. As early as 1964, Stuart Hall was advising the BBC that there was a need among West Indian listeners for provision of ‘specialist information – about how society is organized, what their rights are, etc.’ and for ‘knowledge – language teaching, etc.,’ which could best be served by local radio broadcasting.¹⁴ Subsequent reports from within the BBC also suggested the need for dedicated programming for West Indian communities – which would, in spite of the feedback from the 1965 Conference, be geared specifically to ‘remedial’ help with previously unacknowledged ‘language difficulties.’¹⁵

There is certainly a sense in which this emphasis on language fitted, as we have seen, with the BBC’s existing model of programming for ethnic minority communities, which revolved around language support, on the successful model of Make Yourself At Home, and relied on the expertise of the English by Radio unit. In other words – and in relation to a West Indian community which, in many ways, it barely knew – this had the merit of being something the Corporation already knew how to do. English by Radio was also a strong driver of the project, and its end-of-empire fantasies of English’s linguistic dominion should probably not go unremarked. As its Director Christopher Dilke put it, surveying the unit’s changing role in the era of decolonisation, ‘Our future, then, is one of increasing difficulty and complexity, but at least we have booked seats on a voyage which has a definite destination, the establishment of English as the world language.’¹⁶ Yet the University of Brixton project also needs to be understood in relation to contemporary debates about the role of language in West Indian communities in Britain and in the education of West Indian children in British schools. As the sociolinguist Viv Edwards, among others, reported at the time, white teachers of West Indian children often regarded their language as ‘“babyish”, “careless and slovenly”, “lacking proper grammar” and even “very relaxed like the way they walk.”’¹⁷ Bernard Coard’s influential How The West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Subnormal In the British School System, published in 1971, summarised arguments that had long been made by black educational activists (organised since the mid-1960s under the umbrella of the Black Education Movement) in addressing the British school system’s failures in supporting West Indian children and their disproportionate allocation to ‘educationally subnormal’ (ESN) schools. Coard emphasised the impact of linguistic prejudice on the part of teachers – bound up, of course, in complex ways, with race prejudice – as well as unacknowledged communication problems deriving from:

[L]inguistic differences between West Indian English and ‘standard classroom’ English. The West Indian child’s choice of words, usage and meaning of words, pronunciation, and intonation sometimes present tremendous difficulties in communication with the teacher, and vice versa. This factor, while recognized in a lip-service way by many of the teachers and other authorities involved, is often ignored when assessing and generally relating with the child. Thus, teachers often presume to describe West Indian children as being ‘dull,’ when in fact no educated assessment of the child’s intelligence can be made under these circumstances.¹⁸

These, then, were the contexts in which, in 1969, the BBC commissioned a language-teaching radio series for West Indian immigrants with a ‘soap-opera format’ – its humorous and involving storylines intended to draw listeners in, to maximise its popularity as a drama and to mitigate the sense that it was a ‘remedial’ project.¹⁹ Louis Marriott, a Jamaican journalist, broadcaster and playwright living in London, and already producing a magazine programme for immigrants for BBC Radio London called New Londoners, was commissioned to write the script.²⁰ Marriott was also a member of the Caribbean Artists’ Movement (CAM), the hugely influential London-based artists’ and activists’ collective which, as I have discussed elsewhere, was instrumental, through the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the development of a distinctly Caribbean literary aesthetic grounded in Caribbean creole languages and vernacular cultures.²¹ John La Rose, one of CAM’s founding members, also helped to set up the Black Education Movement, with its emphasis on the revaluing of black children’s speech. Marriott, certainly, regarded his work on The University of Brixton as consonant with these projects; as he has put it in a recent article, ‘the BBC, the final a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I The Radical Popular
• Part II The Middlebrow
• Part III Commodification
• Part IV Technology