Academically, over the years a large number of colleagues have offered invaluable support, guidance, and friendship. At the University of Birmingham, I am grateful to the late Michael Green for the coffees, cakes, and crucial cultural studies connection. Thanks to Dave Gunning, who cosupervised my PhD; Tony Kushner, who examined it and helped me to think about how I could develop it; and Richard Clay, for too many pints to mention. Thanks also to Chris Moores and Gavin Schaffer, for the advice and, just as important, the football chat. The History Department at Queen’s has provided an incredibly supportive environment in which to finish this project, and thanks particularly to Sean O’Connell, who kindly read sections of the final manuscript. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of that manuscript and James Vernon, the editor of the Berkeley Series in British Studies at University of California Press, who bought into the project from the beginning and offered input and feedback that went far beyond the call of duty. What follows is an infinitely better book because of it. Finally, it is difficult to quantify the debt of gratitude I owe to Matthew Hilton for believing in an enthusiastic MA student and for subsequently becoming a much-valued PhD supervisor, collaborator, mentor, and friend. Thank you.
I would also like to thank my friends and family. Thanks to Josie Kelly, who employed me as a postgrad on the basis of a Specials badge and to whom I will eventually return her voice recorder. Thanks to the Hall Green and Badock crews for the endless nights of escapism, and to my brother Laurence Connell for always being there. Finally, I would like to thank my parents. My mother, Myra Connell, has read almost every draft of everything I have ever written. She has been a constant source of emotional and intellectual support and remains a complete inspiration. My father, John Dalton, provided the initial spark for many of this book’s key themes through his involvement in Birmingham’s community arts scene. He died in March 2013 and left a big gap behind. Without either mum or dad, none of this would be possible.
Abbreviations
| AAM | Anti-Apartheid Movement |
| ACDL | Anglo-Caribbean Dominoes League |
| ACSHO | African-Caribbean Self-Help Organisation |
| AFFOR | All Faiths for One Race |
| ANL | Anti-Nazi League |
| ARC | Asian Resource Centre |
| AYM | Asian Youth Movement |
| BAFC | Black Audio Film Collective |
| BBS | Birmingham Black Sisters |
| CCCS | Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies |
| ESN | educationally subnormal |
| EU | European Union |
| FCF | Faith and Confidence Finance |
| GLC | Greater London Council |
| HCTP | Handsworth Community Theatre Project |
| IRR | Institute of Race Relations |
| IT | International Times |
| IWA | Indian Workers’ Association |
| NF | National Front |
| RAAS | Racial Adjustment Action Society |
| RAR | Rock Against Racism |
| UCPA | Universal Coloured People’s Association |
| UKIP | UK Independence Party |
| WASU | West African Students Union |
| WELD | Westminster Endeavour for Liaison and Development |
| WMCC | West Midlands County Council |
Introduction
Black Handsworth
In 1981 a vision of Africa arrived in a district of Birmingham, Great Britain’s second largest city. In the small garden behind its premises in Handsworth, an inner area to the north of the city, a community center unveiled what it called its “African village.” Replete with thatched huts, climbing plants, and a pond containing a crocodile crafted out of a chain of elm logs, its aim was to disrupt the well-worn stereotypes surrounding those formerly slum neighborhoods that, like Handsworth, had become home to immigrants from Britain’s colonies and former colonies in the postwar years. Pitched as an “African oasis” less than two miles from Birmingham’s central hub of modernist shopping malls and concrete subways, the village was certainly an unusual addition to the city’s postindustrial landscape. But it was in keeping with an internationalist line of vision the community center had adopted since opening in 1978 as the Handsworth Cultural Centre. At the heart of this was an emphasis on an exploration of the transnational networks and movements that made up what has been termed the “black globality.”1 Inside the center, for example, well-worn posters of Bob Marley and Angela Davis framed a rehearsal space used by a troupe made up of local teenagers who were developing specialisms in Nigerian and Azanian dance. In January 1980 the center raised funds for sixteen young people to visit Jamaica to learn about the island’s culture and meet with grandparents, siblings, and other relatives; three years later, to a predictable outcry about the prospect of a “rain dance on the rates,” more funds were raised, this time to send a group to Ghana to research West African dancing and drumming techniques.2
The center’s primary users were the children of the generation of Caribbean migrants who had journeyed to the British metropole in the 1950s and early 1960s, often drawn to Birmingham because of the labor shortages in the region’s manufacturing and vehicle industries.3 By the time the Handsworth Centre opened its doors in 1978, this generation had become formerly colonial peoples, with the last vestiges of Britain’s formal empire having largely been swept away.4 Yet this was an ambiguous moment, something made apparent when, in April 1982, Margaret Thatcher’s first Conservative government embarked on a military conflict with Argentina over the Falkland Islands, a British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic Ocean with a predominantly white population of some eighteen hundred people. The eventual defeat of Argentina helped to stir up a patriotic fervor in Britain that, according to one Conservative minister, “‘finally laid the ghost’” of Britain’s 1956 humiliation over the Suez Canal.5
Located on Hamstead Road, a busy thoroughfare connecting Handsworth with the city center to the south and the affluent Handsworth Wood district to the north, the center’s African village was indicative of a different sensibility. It was shaped not only by the black globality but also—as the trips the center arranged to the Caribbean and West Africa suggest—by the lived presence of what might be understood as a “diasporan consciousness.”6 These parallel developments, fueled as they were by contrasting transatlantic perspectives, help introduce a particular set of questions. What, for example, was the significance of a community center opening a mock African village as Britain was about to embark on a conflict so intimately connected with its imperial past? In what other ways was this diasporan consciousness manifest in Handsworth, and what does its presence tell us about the experience of being black in 1980s Britain? How did this consciousness impact Britain’s key sites of postwar black settlement, of which Handsworth was only one prominent example? And what can an exploration of the specifics of such a locale tell us about the nature of postcolonial Britain? In this book’s reconstruction of 1980s “black Handsworth,” these are the questions that provide its guiding focus.
Black Handsworth emerged in the context of what has become the familiar story of postwar migration. The 1948 British Nationality Act was a key legislative marker that in theory granted equal citizenship to all subjects across the empire, even if the act was a politically expedient attempt to respond, following the 1947 partition of India, to the growing specter of imperial decline. Prewar black activists in Britain and specifically London often based their campaigns for racial equality on a demand for citizenship rights that materially advanced the status of black populations across the empire. The passage of the 1948 act meant that when the postwar generation became only the latest example of a long-standing tradition of black subjects settling in the imperial “mother country,” they did so as British citizens who could make assertive claims about their right to be there on an equal footing with longtime residents of the metropole.7 By 1961, 10 percent of the Handsworth population, or some 2,656 residents, had been born in the “New Commonwealth,” with the vast majority coming from the Anglophone Caribbean. Within a decade, largely as a result of the arrival of migrants