Black Handsworth. Kieran Connell

political organizations as a means of framing the struggles they waged locally over issues such as a culturally insensitive education system, a lack of adequate housing, and the passing of ever-more-restrictive immigration controls. This perspective, “lodged between the local and the global,” for some organizations formed the basis of a strategically inclusive politics that emphasized the shared trajectories of Handsworth’s African Caribbean and South Asian populations: both a historic relationship to British colonialism and the mutual attempts at navigating the effects of what was understood as a form of neocolonialism in contemporary Britain.⁶⁷ But as these global perspectives played out in the locale, chapter 1 suggests, this notionally inclusive “black” political platform was beginning to break down. Activists increasingly saw their role in Handsworth as committed social workers, as well as, more conventionally, lobbyists and political campaigners. In wanting to develop practical responses to the many inequalities that were faced by their constituents, however, many often found this necessitated ethnically tailored responses. To some extent, as women activists fought to gain recognition of the particular position black and Asian women were in, this is in keeping with the familiar narrative of the fragmentation of new social movements and the concurrent rise of identity politics. However, as subsequent chapters make clear, this is also a story about the growing importance within African Caribbean communities of a specific reading of the black globality and the reemergence—culturally, as well as politically—of a Pan-Africanist frame of reference.

      Chapter 2 moves from the domain of formal politics to the politics of representation in the context of the ongoing moral panic around the supposedly violent, insurrectional threat posed by the black inner city and the parallel emergence of a nationwide black arts scene developed by practitioners from within neighborhoods like Handsworth. Focusing specifically on the visual arts, the chapter shows how local artists were engaged in a dual project to, on the one hand, undermine the images of rioting, violence, and conflict that had come to define the black inner city in the popular imaginary, and, on the other hand, contribute to an expanded archive of the development of postcolonial Britain. For some practitioners—such as the London-based filmmakers the Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC), whose 1986 documentary Handsworth Songs marked a key intervention in Handsworth’s visual cultures—this meant seeking to connect contemporary race relations discourse with the legacies of colonialism in order to disrupt the widespread social and political disavowal of Britain’s imperial past. For others, such as the documentary photographer Vanley Burke, it meant a quasi-anthropological ambition to record a more community-oriented formation and the political marches, reggae concerts, street styles, pubs, churches, and other institutions that testified to the establishment and evolution of black Handsworth. In both cases, there could often be a tension between the desire to present an ostensibly authentic image of post­colonial Britain and the perennial appearance in artists’ work of images that could conform to the stereotypes commonly found in the pages of tabloid newspapers. Nevertheless, taken together, this body of work is seen as forming part of a shared political project, one that constitutes an alternative, if at times problematic, visual cartography of a black locality—one that in many ways the remainder of this book sets out to understand.⁶⁸

      The final two chapters interrogate Handsworth’s everyday social life and the presence of the diasporan consciousness within it. They traverse contrasting diasporic routes, in which the emphasis shifts from the figure of Africa and specifically Ethiopia in chapter 3 to, in the final chapter, the invocation of Caribbean symbolism and patterns of sociability. Chapter 3 charts the reemergence—more than four decades after London had become a hotbed of Pan-African political organization—of more general, cultural, and social iterations of a Pan-Africanist outlook. Prompted by the transatlantic crossing of Rastafarianism via Jamaican reggae music, this was manifest in a diverse range of settings, from theater and dance groups and the work of reggae bands and “dub poets,” to the prominence of a Rastafarian style and a related subculture that revolved around sound system events. In this often masculine milieu, African and Ethiopian imagery contributed to an imagined transnational community that helped a young black generation in particular to enact a powerful reappropriation of blackness and, in so doing, negotiate the inequalities they encountered in the context of 1980s Britain. Chapter 4, with its emphasis on the case studies of a cricket club, pubs, churches, and the home, enters into the most quotidian elements of everyday life. It finds that for the older generations that largely occupied these spaces, the practices that took place inside were a means of evoking their previous lives in the Caribbean: for example, the adoption of what was seen as a specifically West Indian style of cricket; the centrality of the pub game dominoes; the importance attached to a specific style of religious worship; and, entering into the domestic sphere, a particular aesthetic in which the front room functioned, for women in particular, as a key signifier of status and cultural capital. The sociability inside these spaces gets at the enduring ambiguities of the Caribbean inheritance: the lingering, lived presence of a Victorian colonial ethos, an aspirational desire for respectability in Britain, and—signaling a move from an imagined community to an emotional one—an affective attachment to life in the Caribbean. Having unequivocally moved from the status of sojourners to settlers, Britain’s black population continued to look out across the black globality. In so doing, they were establishing this particular diasporic formation as an assertive presence in the one-time mother country.

      There are certainly absences in this story and areas that warrant a more detailed exploration than Black Handsworth can provide. For example, while chapter 1 deals with the alternative, “supplementary” schools that were set up by black activists in response to the ethnocentricity of the mainstream curriculum, more historical work is required to trace the long-term effects of inequalities in schooling and the impact of the “multicultural” reforms that were gradually introduced from the mid-1970s onward.⁶⁹ Likewise, the issue of employment—so central to narratives of postwar migration and, in a different way, to understandings of the effects of the fracturing of the postwar political consensus in Britain—needs to be more fully examined in relation to black communities. This not only includes the ongoing demands for trade unions to seriously mobilize to counteract racial discrimination in the workplace, but also the ways in which the particularities of class, age, and gender within black communities influenced experiences of a rapidly changing economic climate. Education, work, and trade unionism each held prominent positions in what would become the classic social histories of working-class life in Britain that were published in the 1970s and 1980s.⁷⁰ If these themes are relatively absent here, in other respects the spatial settings I do examine—for example, social clubs, pubs, churches, and domestic interiors—echo the other case studies drawn upon by historians in their explorations of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century working-class formations.⁷¹ These works were often indebted to The Uses of Literacy (1957)—Richard Hoggart’s classic, semiautobiographical study of class and community in the Hunslet district of Leeds—and were published just as Hoggart’s cultural studies project was developing out of his Birmingham Centre into a dramatically expanded examination of the politics of representation.⁷² In different ways, both traditions have guided the rationale for the choice of case studies in this book.

      The later chapters, in their focus on black Handsworth’s musical forms and sites of leisure, perhaps stand out as having the most obvious parallels with an earlier brand of social history. The opening chapters, in contrast, are concerned less with how the black structure of feeling was lived on a day-to-day basis in Handsworth than with the ways in which it was articulated and represented: first ideologically, through forms of community politics, and then artistically, primarily through photography and film. It is chapter 2, “Visualizing Handsworth,” that draws most explicitly on work emanating from cultural studies. This chapter not only acts as a bridge connecting the study of Handsworth’s formal political activity with the later chapters that examine music, leisure, and everyday life. It also emphasizes the central role of representation in community formation. As I show, this was often aimed at external audiences, as part of an attempt by Handsworth artists to both neutralize and challenge the potency of racialized stereotypes regarding the black inner city. But it also had important internal functions, as a means of recording key moments in the development of a particular black