Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail

Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool

Jacqueline Nassy Brown

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780691115634, 9780691115627
• eBook ISBN: 9781400826414
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Social Sciences

The port city of Liverpool, England, is home to one of the oldest Black communities in Britain. Its members proudly date their history back at least as far as the nineteenth century, with the global wanderings and eventual settlement of colonial African seamen. Jacqueline Nassy Brown analyzes how this worldly origin story supports an avowedly local Black politic and identity--a theme that becomes a window onto British politics of race, place, and nation, and Liverpool's own contentious origin story as a gloriously cosmopolitan port of world-historical import that was nonetheless central to British slave trading and imperialism.


This ethnography also examines the rise and consequent dilemmas of Black identity. It captures the contradictions of diaspora in postcolonial Liverpool, where African and Afro-Caribbean heritages and transnational linkages with Black America both contribute to and compete with the local as a basis for authentic racial identity. Crisscrossing historical periods, rhetorical modes, and academic genres, the book focuses singularly on "place," enabling its most radical move: its analysis of Black racial politics as enactments of English cultural premises. The insistent focus on English culture implies a further twist. Just as Blacks are racialized through appeals to their assumed Afro-Caribbean and African cultures, so too has Liverpool--an Irish, working-class city whose expansive port faces the world beyond Britain--long been beyond the pale of dominant notions of authentic Englishness. Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail studies "race" through clashing constructions of "Liverpool."

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER ONE Setting Sail
• CHAPTER TWO Black Liverpool, Black America, and the Gendering of Diasporic Space
• CHAPTER THREE 1981
• CHAPTER FOUR Genealogies: Place, Race, and Kinship
• CHAPTER FIVE Diaspora and Its Discontents: A Trilogy
• CHAPTER SIX My City, My Self: A Folk Phenomenology
• CHAPTER SEVEN A Slave to History: Local Whiteness in a Black Atlantic Port
• CHAPTER EIGHT The Ghost of Muriel Fletcher
• CHAPTER NINE Local Women and Global Men: The Liverpool That Was
• POSTSCRIPT The Leaving of Liverpool
• N O T E S
• REFERENCES