Blackening Britain

Caribbean Radicalism from Windrush to Decolonization

James G. Cantres

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
• Year: 2020
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781538143551
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History

Covering the period from the interwar years through the arrival of the steamship SS Empire Windrush from Jamaica in 1948 and culminating in the period of decolonization in the British Caribbean by the early 1970s, this project situates the development of networks of communication, categories of identification, and Caribbean radical politics both in the metropole and abroad. Blackening Britain explores how articulations of Caribbean identity formation corresponded to the following themes: organic collective action, political mobilization, cultural expressions of shared consciousness, and novel patterns of communication. Blackening Britain shows how colonial migrants developed tools of resistance in the imperial center predicated on their racialized consciousness that emerged from their experiences of alienation and discrimination in Britain.

This book also interrogates the ways in which prominent West Indian activists, intellectuals, political actors, and artists conceived of their relationship to Britain. Ultimately, this work shows a move away from British identity and a radical, revolutionary consciousness rooted in the West Indian background and forged in the contentious space of metropolitan Britain.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: More English than the English?
• 1 From Small Islands to a Small Island: The Caribbean Background and Interwar Migration
• 2 The 5th Pan-African Congress, Manchester 1945: Black Internationalism in the Context of Britain
• 3 After 1948: Existentialists in Exile: Intellectual Responses to Racialized Realities
• 4 “We’re Here, and We’re Here in a Big Way”: West Indians Respond to the Notting Hill Race Riots
• 5 Diasporic Artist-Activists and Imperial Reckoning: Academic and Grassroots Responses to Notting Hill
• 6 British Caribbean Independence and the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act: Meanings of British Nationality
• 7 Black Publishers and Revolutionary Epistemologies: Radical Knowledges and Black Post-Nationalism
• Conclusion: Beyond Britain: Black Liberation Dreams
• Coda [Crisis]: Windrush at 70: The Hostile Environment
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Author Biographical Note