Black Handsworth. Kieran Connell

As long-standing port cities, Liverpool and Bristol played significant roles in the transatlantic slave trade and, like Cardiff in Wales, have a history of ethnic diversity stretching back at least to the late nineteenth century, when a transient population of black merchant seamen began to have a significant presence. Birmingham, by contrast, had no comparable prewar black presence and moreover is one of the most landlocked cities in the United Kingdom.⁵⁵ Yet this further emphasizes the significance of the transatlantic dialogues that, in the context of the long 1980s, sustained the lived cultures of one of its foremost black districts.

      In many respects, Handsworth was unusual too. From the 1960s onward, for instance, as the midlands grew increasingly notorious as a supposed hotbed of racial discord, Handsworth captured the attention of a remarkable range of stakeholders. This included academic researchers at Stuart Hall’s CCCS and, later, a race relations institute at Warwick University headed by the South African sociologist John Rex, who was invested in a project to develop a modified sociology of race that moved away from the studies of the late 1940s and 1950s, which, as Chris Waters has shown, were often both highly racialized and intimately bound up with growing uncertainties about “Britishness” in the context of decolonization.⁵⁶ It also included charitable bodies, local and national journalists, writers, television producers, and filmmakers. Indeed, with every passing local incident interest in Handsworth grew, to the point at which one local minister felt moved to place a sign outside his church reminding passersby that “Handsworth is not a zoo.”⁵⁷ Apart from the sociological investigations, sensationalist newspaper stories, and television news bulletins, by the long 1980s Handsworth had also become home to an extraordinary range of creative black talent. This included the reggae band Steel Pulse, formed in 1975 and whose debut album, Handsworth Revolution (1978), became an immediate UK hit; the poet Benjamin Zephaniah, who in the late 1970s honed his trade as a master of ceremonies (MC) on local reggae sound systems or hi-fis and in 2009 came in third in a poll to find Britain’s favorite poet; the documentary photographer Vanley Burke, one of the most prominent chroniclers of postwar black settlement; and numerous other photographers, sound system performers, reggae bands, amateur memoirists, and dance troupes that achieved varying degrees of prominence. This talent ranged from Steel Pulse, who in 1987 became the first non-Jamaican act to receive a Grammy award for best reggae album, to the unheralded Jamaican writer whose memoirs of his life in Handsworth never made it into print, and included everything else in between.

      It is this body of material that—alongside the literature of local political organizations and scores of interviews with a cast of characters who occupied various positions within the social fabric of black Handsworth—provides this book with its archival base. The limitations of such sources are well known. Certainly the material drawn upon here is by no means exhaustive. Many of the case studies under consideration—for example, pubs, cricket clubs, and reggae bands—functioned at least in part as sites for performances of masculinity, meaning the voices of women could in these instances often be more difficult to access. At the same time, the diversity of the sources that have been assembled does represent an attempt to get at a sense of lived consciousness that for Williams was encapsulated by the notion of a structure of feeling.⁵⁸ And it also indicates the extent to which this study sits at the intersections between social and cultural history and the related field of cultural studies. As Geoff Eley has pointed out, some of the earliest work on the legacies of empire and its place within the domestic British milieu emanated not from within the discipline of history, but from scholars operating within the often-marginalized field of cultural studies in the late 1970s and 1980s.⁵⁹ In what became seminal interventions, Policing the Crisis (the CCCS study of the moral panic around mugging), the jointly authored The Empire Strikes Back, and Paul Gilroy’s There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (which began life as his doctoral dissertation at the CCCS) aimed to bring race to bear on cultural studies and its by now familiar ways of operating: the use of Williams and continental Marxism as theoretical paradigms; the rigorous appraisal of the spectrum of popular cultural forms; and the anthropological understanding of culture that saw it as embedded in people’s everyday behaviors and patterns of living. While a subsequent historiography began to engage with the project of unpicking the ambivalent presence of the imperial legacy in postcolonial Britain, with respect to the latter decades of the twentieth century, works emanating from the cultural studies tradition have largely been left to dominate the field.⁶⁰

      My own work builds on this approach in order excavate and foreground the significance of black cultural forms, political movements, art, leisure, and sociability. The arguments made by Hall, Gilroy, and others are engaged with throughout this book, but these scholars also often appear as historical characters who were in different ways shaped by the social and political climates they were each attempting to understand. Hall in particular is a pervasive figure. As the recipient of a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford, his was undoubtedly a highly specific trajectory. But his middle-class upbringing in Jamaica would to some extent have been a familiar habitus to many postwar Caribbean immigrants.⁶¹ Moreover, he shared with them the disorientation that came with the realization that the move to the metropole often corresponded with the effective dissolution of both the Caribbean “pigmentocracy,” in which class and social position were closely aligned to the particularities of skin tone, as well as the specificities of island-based national identities.⁶² The parallel arrival of that early generation of Caribbean migrants on boats such as the SS Windrush, “dressed to the nines” in suits and frocks indicative of a determination to make an impression in Britain, constituted for Hall—as he recounted in his posthumously published memoir Familiar Stranger—a highly emotive moment. In 1979, having followed many of this generation to Birmingham, Hall left the CCCS to take up a professorship at the Open University. It was during this period that he became an important sounding board for a cohort of British-born black artists who were, from their own particular vantage points, attempting to use their work to grapple with many of the subjects that energized Hall throughout his life, including a number of artists emanating from, or engaging with, Handsworth specifically. Hall was at different times part of the academic surveillance of Handsworth, not only in the context of his work on the mugging panic, but also with respect to his later role as a member of the independent inquiry into the 1985 riots. He was in a whole host of ways at more than one remove from black Handsworth. But he was also in dialogue with it and, more generally, both a chronicler and a product of a diasporic 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