English 360/560: Black Britain > Daily Updates


Check here for announcements, afterthoughts, clarifications, schedule changes, reading assignments, and homework.

For anyone out there still listening:

Thanks to Naomi, Maia, and Marcus for hipping us to some dope beats, some hip films, and a landmark novel. And thanks to the rest of you for getting up early to give them an appreciative audience. I've now posted my final lecture, for them what's interested.

Also: one last tip--about two more Black Britons you should keep your eye on.

  • I've already mentioned the young indie DIY filmmaker Cecile Emeke (website | Wikipedia). Google her and you'll find lots of profiles and interviews, including this one in The New York Times and this other one in The New Yorker. But never mind reading about her: watch her web videos about the global Black diaspora called Strolling. (The UK episodes are here.) And then move on to Ackee & Saltfish, the film and/or the web series.
  • Anthony Joseph (website | Wikipedia | Poetry Archive | British Council Literature) was born in Trinidad, and although he moved to England as an adult in 1989, it's really just in the last decade or so that he has had anything like the widespread recognition he deserves. Joseph is primarily a performance poet--he leads and records with the Afrobeat-flavored The Spasm Band--although he has also written a slightly loopy/experimental novel called The Aftrican Origins of UFOs. You can hear a variety of his work on Soundcloud and watch a video of his poem "She Is the Sea" on YouTube. His latest album was produced by MeShell Ndegeocello, if you're impressed by that sort of thing. Oh: and back in 2013, Public Radio International's The World did a profile on him.
  • And okay--make that three. You should also check out Bernardine Evaristo, who among other things has written two novels in verse(!). And her latest (prose) novel, Mr. Loverman, is fabulous.

For Monday, May 9 (Final Exam Period)

Class meets from 8:00 (ulp!) to 9:50. I have some free time this Thursday and Friday, if you'd like to meet and bat around some ideas (or for any other reason). E-mail me for an appointment. On Monday, Maia, Marcos, and Naomi have some cool things they've been researching that they'd like to tell you about, so come and be an interested, enthusiastic audience. I will also have some closing remarks, which may or may not mean more to you if you poke around on the "Afterword" page of the online Course Reader.

Here's another context in which to consider the "two-dimensionality" of the Chalfens that we were discussing Monday; it occurred to me as I was reading Willa Paskin's recent New Yorker profile of Sharon Horgan, co-creator (and co-star) of the Channel 4/Amazon Prime series Catastrophe--which is pretty brilliant, in case you haven't seen it. "The hallmark of the British sitcom," says Paskin, is a quasi-unbearable protagonist who is an Everyman, only insofar as every man can laugh at him. The unrepentant snob Basil Fawlty, the beastly glamour-pusses Edina and Patsy, the fatuous narcissist Alan Partridge, and the thirsty buffoon David Brent." I remember reading a tribute to her father that Smith wrote some years ago in which she mentioned their shared love of Fawlty Towers....

Stay healthy, keep the humor dry, and don't forget to eat (and sleep). Undergrad essays are not due till Tuesday; grad papers, Wednesday.

Webness:

For Wednesday, May 4 (Day 29):

One last dental checkup. Let's see if we can come up with a few more words of wisdom about White Teeth and give ourselves at least the illusion of "closure."

Ponder the final essay prompt so that you're ready to brainstorm a bit. I may also have some closing remarks--or I may decide to leave those till next Monday.

Linkies:

For Monday, May 2 (Day 28):

Brush your White Teeth. (Don't forget to floss!)

On the web:

For Wednesday, April 27 (Day 27):

A few minutes, first of all, to discuss "The Telling Part" and "Black Bottom." And then let's begin extracting White Teeth (ouch!).

Interwebbage:

For Monday, April 25 (Day 26):

Let's talk about Jackie Kay. A discussion forum, with a few starter questions, is open now. Lots of great internet resources out there, including plenty of YouTube videos. And how did I miss this? Last month, Jackie Kay was named as the new Scots "Makar"--the poet laureate of Scotland! (BBC Radio 4 | Guardian 1 | Guardian 2)

On the Interwebs:

For Wednesday, April 20 (Day 25):

Dude! Diran Adebayo.

Looking ahead: the BBC/Masterpiece Theater mini-series adaptation of White Teeth (with Om Puri, the dad from My Son the Fanatic), is available to stream on Amazon Prime with an "Acorn" subscription.

Steatopygous Internet Miscellany:

  • Saartjie Baartman (Wikipedia)
  • And from the sublime to the ridiculous: reports that Beyonce is planning a film about Baartman: BBC | Daily Mail (The Mail, a conservative tabloid with a predilection for sensationalism, is the second-best-selling newspaper in Britain, behind The Sun)

For Monday, April 18 (Day 24):

So: I've opened a forum for the readings by D'Aguiar (rhymes with "cigar"), Hall, and Gilroy--the last time this semester I'll ask you to bust your head over a bunch of criticism/theory by XY-chromosome types. (Though to be fair, D'Aguiar is known more as a poet than as a critic. The excerpts from Diran Adebayo's novel for Wednesday are themselves somewhat testosterone-fueled, but after that it's on to two of my all-time favorite writers, who happen to be on Black Britain's distaff side: Jackie Kay and Zadie Smith.)

Links to all required texts in the "What Kind of Black" unit should now be good. Still working on the FYI/Recommended column. Perhaps Monday will be the day we finally find a half-hour to devote to Grace Nichols.

Miscellany:

For Wednesday, April 13 (Day 23):

Sorry for the late update. (The server that lets me upload to my website was being wonky again last night, and whenever that happens, it doesn't get fixed till early the next morning.)

It's possible that our fanaticism for Hanif Kureishi hasn't yet faded, but there are other things to look at (and listen to) for Wednesday. Read the essay by Rushdie and, assuming I manage to update the audio links, have a listen to Apache Indian and Goodness Gracious Me. Also: take some time to explore this entire unit's supplemental resources (right-hand column). And last but not least: make some time for Grace Nichols.

Links:

For Monday, April 11 (Day 22):

The text of the My Son the Fanatic screenplay is in the London Kills Me section of the course reader, along with two other essays I'd like you to read. As always, don't forget to browse the "recommended" column. The published screenplay is based on the "shooting script," which often diverges from the finished film in ways both large and small. I've noted most of those changes in my copy of the screenplay.

Moodle forum is open. And if you want to watch part or all of the movie again, on your own, I've discovered that it is in fact available to stream on Netflix. (And I'm sure La Dolce Video in Northtown has a DVD copy, as does the HSU library.)

I completely forgot that there was a PowerPoint slideshow to accompany that e-lecture I included with the last update. I've gone back and inserted references to slide numbers in the appropriate places.

News:

  • The California Faculty Association has come to a tentative agreement with the CSU administration over a new contract, which means that plans for the upcoming strike have been put on hold as faculty consider and vote on the agreement. Classes will meet April 13-19.
  • Yale (ahem!) creative writing professor Caryl Phillips is profiled in advance of a two-week residency at the University of Virginia.

For Wednesday, April 6 (Day 21):

A selection of Grace Nichols's poetry is here. Not sure when we'll take it up. (That depends on the strike.) The selection comes from the now out-of-print Penguin Modern Poets, vol. 8 (1996), but the poems themselves were originally published in two collections: The Fat Black Woman's Poems (1984) and Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman (1989).

Before we begin watching My Son the Fanatic on Wednesday, I'll be lecturing a bit (I know; I'm doing a lot of that lately) on the devolution of "Black Britain." If you're interested the sort of jargony academic prose that yours truly once spun as a fresh-faced Assistant Professor, then I'll invite you to read my ancient essay on that topic, which I've moved over into the "Recommended" column of the Course Reader Table of Contents (for the next unit, entitled "London Kills Me"). Reading it ahead of time may make my in-class remarks more intelligible--although as you know, there are no guarantees in life.

Also in the recommended column: some of David Dabydeen's "Coolie Odyssey" (you'll note that it is not in fact written in "the creole of [his] childhood") and Wikipedia's entry on "British Asians." While the screenplay of My Son the Fanatic is slated for next week, you may of course read it before watching the film--or even print it out and bring it with you to follow along (and see how the "shooting script" differs from the final cut).

Not done thinking about the language question? Try this video of Caryl Phillips speaking with Fred D'Aguiar, a very good poet who was born in Britain, spent a decade growing up in Guyana, then returned to the UK at age 12. (You may remember that he was recently appointed to head the Creative Writing program at UCLA. We'll read some of his poetry in a couple of weeks.) D'Aguiar began writing in 1979 and his first published collection, Mama Dot (1985) was "set" in Guyana. Pick up the conversation at about 8:00 and watch till around 13:15.

Late-breaking news: I've transformed my planned prefatory remarks into an e-lecture, below:

[Here is a link to the accompanying PowerPoint slide show. References to slide numbers are inside square brackets.] Our work over the past couple of weeks dovetails in part with the essay of mine that I invited you to look at for today:  I’ve been especially keen for you to get a sense of how “Black Britain” as a political and cultural force was performed into being—how it was quite literally through concerted acts of music, narrative and poetry (as well as through political organization and mass action) that Black Britain imagined itself into existence.  We may have missed some of the nuances of those performances, especially their formal nuances—we could have spent a lot more time doing line-by-line explications and close readings of those John Agard poems, especially—but I’m hoping that some of you made up in your reading responses for what we didn’t get to in class.

Now, before we watch My Son the Fanatic, I want to elaborate a bit on the other focus of my essay, namely: the paradoxical fact that, almost no sooner was Black Britain born than it began to look seriously ill.  That is: this entity which Paul Gilroy once called (in an essay of his we didn’t read) a [Slide 1] “precarious political grouping, which for a brief, precious moment…allowed settlers from all the corners of the Empire to find some meaning in an open definition of the term ‘black’”—this slowly fell apart in the decade after the New Cross fire and the long hot summer of 1981.  Mind you: as a political and cultural category, the idea of “Black Britain” still had some currency, and it was still strategically useful (and powerful) for a good number of years, but these days the term is rarely used, as it once was, as a shorthand for all people of color in the UK.  And I think “Black Britain” unraveled in large part because of a built-in contradiction that we can foreground by asking a simple question (a question that Maia was asking already a couple of weeks ago) [Slide 2]:  “Where have the Asians been all this time”?

Let’s back up to 1981 for a minute.  After that critical summer, which really marked the fullest—and fieriest—emergence of our multi-ethnic coalition, Black Britain was both exercised anc exhausted, worked up and tired out.  I don’t want to overstate the case:  you’ve already gotten a sense how much more action and agitation there was, both organized and spontaneous, by people of color throughout the 1980s [Slides 3 & 4]—and it didn’t only take the form of rioting and protesting and protest poetry. There was plenty of that, which is why it’s mainly what we’ve been focusing on for the past couple of weeks); but there was also a veritable explosion of music, novels, filmmaking, playwriting, and television programming by and about black people (much of it sponsored by Channel 4 [Slide 5]) throughout the decade.  But for a number of reasons, the 80s were also a very tense decade, one in which an already strained sense of inter-ethnic solidarity would be repeatedly tested.  And part of the fallout from both the cultural explosion and the political tension of the 80s was that Asian Britons began to seek (and find) their own cultural distinctiveness. 

Let me explain briefly:  we’ve looked at several different efforts by Black British poets to reshape the “Queen’s English” into something more vital, more supple, more culturally distinctive, more expressive of their lived reality.  At first, young Asians had been very much attracted to (and inspired by) such forceful assertions of black identity. (Gurinder Chadha talks about this in the “2-Tone Britain” documentary, in fact.)  “Bass Culture,” reggae culture—the culture indelibly associated with Black British power—that really was the hip, dominant subculture for quite some time in the late 70s and early 80s, and disaffected youth of all races and ethnicities identified with it, as I’ve mentioned once or twice already.  Asian kids were no exception: they, too, admired both Afro-Caribbean activists’ rebellion in the streets and Afro-Caribbean poets’ rebellious pose on the page (and disk, and in the dancehall [Slide 6]. So whether it meant busting racists’ heads or busting up English, Asians were for many years eager to sign on to this program.  Their allegiance to a cultural movement that was dominated and led mainly by West Indians made it just that much easier to stretch the boundaries of “blackness” to form the sort of political coalition I keep talking about as “Black Britain.”  And yet:  there was a price to be paid for Asians’ participation in such a coalition.   And it’s the liability inherent in any strategic alliance:  by highlighting your common interests, you downplay your individual differences.

It turns out that young British Asian kids, often ambivalently or even in spite of themselves, were also attracted by and loyal to certain aspects of their parents’ culture.  Through their involvement in anti-racist movements, they learned all about the psychology of racial self-hatred; they, too, like the Afro-Caribbeans they so admired, began to feel as though they should draw on their cultural roots for their art.  And so, for example, they began to fuse the folk and pop music forms of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh with British pop and other Western influences—and they produced, most notably, a British version of bhangra (originally a punjabi folk music) [Slide 7]; and they had a huge influence on the development of other dancehall styles like drum-and-bass, besides.  In other words, they didn’t only want to borrow someone else’s culture; they wanted to search (very tentatively at first, then, by the early 90s, more vocally) for their own cultural distinctiveness, to explore what it meant to be Anglo-Indian or Anglo-Pakistani or Anglo-Bangladeshi.   Eventually, they would work all of this into what Kureishi calls, in an essay of his that you’ll read for next week, the “positive assertion of another nonwhite British presence.”

This urge towards cultural self-expression coincided with (and in some ways was fuelled by) another phenomenon of the 80s:  the emergence of an Asian entrepreneurial class and the increasingly disproportionate economic gains of Indians and Pakistanis as a whole, relative to other ethnic minorities (sometimes at the expense of other ethnic minorities).  Asians still suffered from British racism, but it seem to some people that, anecdotally, at least, many of them were succeeding in working their way up the capitalist ladder. (And capitalism in 1980s Britain was a particularly steep and vicious ladder, I might add.)

What these emerging economic and cultural divisions tended to reveal, in hindsight at least, was that the coalition named “Black Britain” had actually been fairly fragile to begin with.  Even in its heyday, the fact was that, even though all ethnic minorities were targets of all kinds of ugly and sometimes brutal racism, nevertheless different ethnic minorities experienced racism differently and were affected by it differently.  (Racists themselves were also beginning to make distinctions: white racist skinheads resented Asians’ perceived economic success, too, and even in the 70s skinheads began to single out Asians from other people of color, categorizing them separately, in their lexicon of racist epithets, as “Pakis.” [Slide 8])  And when push came to shove, different ethnic groups often had different priorities in fighting and responding to racism:  many Muslim Asians, for example, were more understandably concerned with the safety to exercise their religious freedom and with fighting religious bigotry than they were with, say, protesting racist policing in Afro-Caribbean neighborhoods. 

So finally, to come back to The Question:  where were the Asians in what we’ve been studying recently?:  in many ways, were there in the background, in the wings, taken for granted and tacitly regarded as “honorary” blacks or junior partners in the Black British alliance.  Partly that secondary status was a function of sheer numbers:  from the late 1940s through the early 60s (when the first modern immigration restrictions were put in place), West Indian immigration outpaced South Asian immigration by a factor of at least 3 to 1 (and probably more like 4 or 5 to 1).  But by the early 70s, after a spike in immigration by ethnic Indians (largely ethnic Indians expelled from Kenya and Uganda by Idi Amin [Slide 9]), “Asians” were suddenly the largest new immigrant group.  And yet, as I said, the de facto leaders and spokespeople in Black British arts and political organizations still tended to be Afro-Caribbean, and the platforms and programs of those groups tended to articulate predominantly Afro-Caribbean themes.  And the allegiance of ethnic Asians tended to be taken for granted.  So for that reason and others I’ve cited, “Black Britain” got considerably, uh, grayer over the course of the 1980s (and the 1990s; but more on that decade in a couple of weeks)—to the point where, by the end of the 80s, relations between people of African and Asian descent was characterized by a peaceful but sometimes uneasy co-existence which very occasionally flared into open antagonism.  At the very least, then, “Black Britain” was fragmenting into “Black and Asian” Britain [Slide 10].

For Monday, April 4 (Day 20):

Thursday: honor Cesar Chavez. Monday: we forge ahead to "fighting back" on the page. There's an article by David Dabydeen and some poems by John Agard. I think I've done all the updating I'm gonna do of the sound files that go with the text of those poems. (Don't miss the links to videos of performances at the bottom of each of the Agard pages. And here's a version of "Oxford don" glossed for French high school students. Go figure!)

Still hoping to include some poems by Grace Nichols; stay tuned. In the meantime: check out the poems by Merle Collins and the essay by Salman Rushdie in the "Recommended" column.

Link Miscellany:

Since we saw her briefly in Handsworth Songs, you may be curious to read more about Margaret Thatcher. When she died three years ago, there were some wicked items circulating on Facebook, not to mention street parties in Brixton. (For my part, I'll refer you to The Beat's "Stand Down, Margaret.") Beyond that: you can read a summary of The Iron Lady's notorious "Swamped" interview, view a clip of it as part of a documentary on immigration (apologies for the dubious source, not to mention the hair-raising comments), and read the full text of the interview.

For Wednesday, March 30 (Day 19):

We'll be screening John Akomfrah's landmark film Handsworth Songs, inspired by several days of rioting in the Handsworth neighborhood of Birmingham, Benjamin Zephaniah's home turf, in 1985.  (The free-form documentary--some call it a "visual essay"--was made in 1986 and premiered in January 1987. It was later shown on Britain's Channel 4 television.) Some resources:

For Monday, March 28 (Day 18):

Not much new reading: I'll have another short (short?--is anything ever short with me?) lecture on Monday, and otherwise we'll largely devote the entire week to a couple of "historic" odes by LKJ and Zephaniah. I've moved the chapter by Gilroy mentioned on the syllabus to the "recommended" column. Do explore the multimedia resources in both columns, and let me know about anything else exciting and/or relevant that you find. I'll try to update links and media files in the next few days, and I'll open another discussion forum, too.

Miscellany:

  • Here's Gordon Rohlehr on "dread" in the context of Rastafarianism (from "West Indian Poetry: Some Problems of Assessment" [1972], rpt. in My Strangled City and Other Essays [1992]): "dread" expresses a sense of  "brooding melancholy which seems always on the verge of explosion, but which is under some sort of formal control ... Dread is that quality which defines the static fear-bound relationship between the 'have-gots' and the 'have-nots' ... the historic tension between slaver and slave, between the cruel ineptitude of power on the part of the rulers, and introspective menace and the dream of Apocalypse on the part of the down-trodden." Sounds like the perfect description of the tense mood you get in much of LKJ’s early poetry, where his (mono)tone sounds forlorn, melancholic, worn-down, but also quietly forceful and threatening.

For Wednesday, March 23 (Day 17):

We'll begin by hearing your thoughts about the "dread" poems you discussed in small groups on Monday. Then we'll move on to some poems by Benjamin Zephaniah and Valerie Bloom, written roughly a decade later. (And yet young people of color were still clashing with the cops. Who would've guessed?) And last but not least: Buchi Emecheta, who offers a rather different kind of response to all this Babylonian oppression. (Is Emecheta to the dub poets what Tanty was to the balladeers of The Lonely Londoners?)

Links:

  • Stuart Hall, one of the giants of Cultural Studies (and mentor of Paul Gilroy), died early in 2014. In 2012, he was interviewed for the 35th-anniversary republication of Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (1978), an important antecedent to Gilroy's Ain't No Black.
  • Catching up on The New Yorker at the gym tonight, I read a review of British novelist Neel Mukherjee's 2006 debut, A Life Apart, finally published in the U.S. (Mukherjee has since written two other novels, one of which was nominated for the Booker Prize.)
  • I haven't yet managed to find the source for my (mis?)understanding that dreadlocks were, in part, deliberately designed to inspire "dread" in their beholders (or perhaps to deliberately exaggerate the "dreadful" image that "respectable" people had of early Rastafarians' chosen hairstyle). Wikipedia isn't a whole lot of help. I'll keep searching.
  • Signifyin'/signify(ing): Wikipedia | New York Times | HLG, Jr. @ Stanford | about.com

For Monday, March 21 (Day 16):

In addition to reading midterm essays--with relish!--I'll be doing some catching up during our week off: addressing a backlog of Reading Responses, updating broken links and replacing defunct sound files, etc. I trust you'll have a restful break and come back all recharged.

Read LKJ and Benjamin Zephaniah's poetry, of course. Read the poems by Valerie Bloom, et al. ("Related Texts" column) for purposes of comparison and enrichment. Read the excerpt from Buchi Emecheta's autobiographical novel for a rather different perspective on the events of this volatile period in Black British history. (As usual, there are a few reading prompts on the Moodle forum.) And take advantage of the extra leisure time to explore some of the other resources in that righthand column of the Reader Table of Contents for this unit, too. At the very bottom of that page, moreover, you'll find an interesting piece that Zephaniah--who's become something of a media celebrity over the past twenty years or so (in contrast to LKJ who, while famous, is also famously wary of celebrity tokenism)--did for BBC's "Newsnight" program.

Other Links:

  • Race, sex, (white) women, (male) immigrants. Racial "character," nationalism, and the rhetoric of "contamination." It's complicated. (This time it involves Muslim men in Germany. And a celebrated Algerian writer.)
  • A recent example of discourse analysis that does put women front and center: Katherine Paugh's "The Politics of Childbearing in the British Caribbean and the Atlantic World During the Age of Abolition, 1776-1838," from Slavery and Anti-Slavery in the Atlantic World, just out from Oxford University Press (and free to read and download for a limited time)
  • I just (re-)discovered--in one of the many piles of paper on my desk--a marginally legible photocopy of an account of the Windrush's arrival from the June 23, 1948 edition of the Manchester Guardian. ("Not All Intend to Settle Here," read the original subheader.) Fortunately, the story is also available for free online.
  • And I wasn't gonna clue you in to this for a few more weeks yet, but what the heck: The New Yorker is now writing about her, so the cat's out of the bag--"her" being Cecile Emeke, a young British filmmaker who's been producing the most amazing series of web videos about the global Black diaspora called Strolling. The UK episodes are here. (Get ready: several hours of your life will shortly disappear.)

For Wednesday, March 9 (Day 15):

In the view of the fact that I talked at you for an entire class today (thanks for suffering through even more monologue than usual, by the way), I'm extending the Reading Response deadline by two days. On Wednesday, we'll find a way to actually discuss Paul Gilroy's "Lesser Breeds Without the Law."

For Monday, March 7 (Day 14):

Read Paul Gilroy (next up in the Course Reader, on the "It Dread Inna Inglan" page). I'll update links in the Reader and open a Moodle forum in due time. Fair warning: I may be lecturing a lot (again) on Monday, but this installment of Marjorie Morgan's Historical Geographies blog covers some of the same territory that I plan to.

Lonely exit music:

  • Dept. of Jumbling: this tidbit is especially for those of who enjoyed the use of West Indian creole/patwah in The Lonely Londoners in part because it turns you, the reader, into a figurative “foreigner”:  in 1960, an English reviewer complained that the London depicted in Jamaican writer Andrew Salkey's latest novel (Escape to an Autumn Pavement) seemed like a city “as foreign to an English person as Babylon or Buenos Aires.”
  • Finally, here's Hua Hsu in the February 22d issue of The New Yorker, from a review of Kanye West's latest album: "His career-long fixation on his own contradictions eventually consolidated into an aesthetic, one that gave rise to a generation of male artists, such as Drake and The Weeknd, who wallow in soft self-loathing and explain away their loutish behavior as the result of melancholy and bruised ego." I wouldn't wanna push the analogy too far, but...sound like anyone you know?

For Wednesday, March 2 (Day 13):

I'll talk a bit and play a few calypsos, including the handful that I've put up on the web. You should have a look at the required & recommended materials in the course reader for March 2--and at one relevant bullet point farther down below, right here in this update.

Midterm post-mortem: you'll have to tell me how far it deviated from what you were prepared to see. Scores on the in-class portion range from near-perfect to less-than-one-would-have-hoped-for.

Black Britain In the News:

  • A new documentary about the life and work of C.L.R. James, Every Cook Can Govern, will have its premiere screening in London on March 31. Let's go! Meantime, let's check out the links and videos on the website.
  • Fred D'Aguiar (rhymes with cigar), one of whose poems I think we'll be reading later in the semester (and who interviews Caryl Phillips in this old video from ICA), has just been named head of UCLA's Creative Writing program. (Hmm...I see a Visiting Writer opportunity here....)
  • And as timely as today's headlines--er, assigned reading: The Londonist blog just had a post about calypso in 1950s London. Not exactly academic--or even critical--in its outlook, but it is what it is, and it's got lots of good links. You want critical and academic? Read Ashley Dawson; read Stuart Hall (in the Course Reader).

Other Lonely postscripts:

  • A Lonely factoid: the cover of the Longman edition shows a fresh-off-the-boat immigrant in Piccadilly Circus, next to that famed locale's well-known symbol, the statue of Anteros, commonly mistaken for his twin, Eros. Hmm.
  • One more answer to the question (to invoke the immortal words of Aretha Franklin) Who's Zooming Who? (Or--different soul singer: What's Love Got to Do With It? Which we effectively modified to What's Race, Class, and Gender Got to Do With It? And objectification, and misogyny, and patriarcho-colonial retaliation, and primitivist thrill-seeking, and lurid fascination with the illicit and the taboo and the exotic. Oh, and capitalism.) Critic, scholar, translator, editor, and Brown University poetry professor Robyn Creswell once wrote (about Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish): "[E]ven the most intimate relations are structured, and sometimes made impossible, by forces beyond any individual's control."
  • Can't remember if I gave you the link to this photo gallery of "Windrush" generation photos from the Telegraph. (It's a slideshow.) I think I did.
  • Speaking of calypsos: if you want to hear the original of Tanty's favorite, The Lion's "Fan Me Saga Boy" (which the steel band is playing at Harris's fête), it's on YouTube. (A "saga boy" is a basically a sharp dresser--like a "Zoot Suiter" in the 1940s U.S.--although the term also carries overtones of "streetwise playboy." The lyrics are pretty racy; you can read them--and the ensuing discussion--about halfway down this thread at Mudcat.org.)
  • Finally: I just today got (via ILL) this short essay by Susheila Nasta on seeing her old friend Sam Selvon's photo in the National Portrait Gallery. Here's the photo, which is quite striking, and here it is with other portraits of Selvon by the same photographer, Ida Kar.)

For Monday, February 29 (Day 12):

Midterm madness. The "objective" portion (multiple-choice, true-false, matching, fill-in-the-blank), designed to take roughly a half-hour, will be given from ~10:10 to 10:50; I'll send you home with the essay portion. Again, for the former: review authors and titles; characters, speakers, and plots; signficant passages, themes, and events, etc. ("Primary" texts only: Gronniosaw/Sancho/Equiano, S.I. Martin, Prince/Hill/Said, Una Marson and C.L.R. James, G.V. Desani, Caryl Phillips, Sam Selvon.) For the latter: think retrospectively and comparatively, and begin to imagine what themes or concerns you could track across several texts.

And until 10:10? We'll coast another lime through Lonely Londoners. Plenty left to say. We haven't really even finished what is and isn't problematic about the book's treatment of women, for example (let's hear more about Tanty!), let alone whether it offers much critical distance on the andro-centric world it depicts, or what-all else besides reprehensible morals might play into all the lurid fascination and objectification and exploitation that inform (corrupt?) its black-white/male-female relationships. (Grad--and "grad"--students in particular: make time to read Ashley Dawson?) And what about Moses' world-weariness, his dispiritedness, his almost nihilistic sense of the futility of all the literal and metaphorical "hustling"? Has he--have black people in London--really accomplished nothing?

The link to the list of talking-points (below) is fixed, by the way. It's worth reviewing what's appeared on the Moodle forum, too. (In fact, reviewing all the forums, in addition to your own reading notes and class notes, would be one way of formulating essay ideas.) And yes, I hereby green-light Marcos's suggestion to allow a second "round" of posts to that forum, due Sunday evening, for those who now need to scramble to make their quota.

Linkage:

  • A new literary festival focusing on British writers of color--er colour--debuts Friday, February 26: The Bare Lit Festival. Check out the website and find out who the up-and-comers are.
  • In "Windrush Moderns," Brendan de Caires reviews two recent books about the postwar generation of Black British writers (Caribbean Review of Books)

For Wednesday, February 24 (Day 11):

An entire class full of liming and Lonely ole-talk, centering on the talking points we improvised today. (And maybe other things you wrote about, too.)

Lots of stuff in the "recommended" column of the "Windrush" Reader page that you haven't yet explored, I'll bet. Sadly, another newsreel about the Notting Hill Riots from the Gaumont company and a longer documentary that aired on the then-upstart ITN News channel are no longer publicly available. But for those who just can't get enough, here are some "Windrush"-related articles that I didn't include in the Reader:

  • Randeep Ramesh, "They used to tell us, 'go back home'" (The Independent 15 June 1998)
  • Maev Kennedy, "From Jamaica to the Imperial War Museum" (The Guardian 13 June 1998), a story about the exhibit "From War to Windrush at the IWM"; and a critique of the exhibit from the PhotoCLEC Project, a transnational scholarly endeavor examining the "ways in which photographs from the colonial past have been used by museums, as spaces of public history, to communicate and interpret the colonial past in a postcolonial and multicultural Europe."
  • Sukhdev Sandhu, "Welcome Home" (London Review of Books 4 February 1999)

And finally, an apropos companion piece to The Lonely Londoners:

For Monday, February 22 (Day 10):

First, as per our discussion in class today:

1) The midterm is postponed till Monday, February 29.
2) The soft deadline for reading responses is henceforth pushed back to 11:00 p.m. (but they're always welcome earlier).
3) For undergrads: reading responses will be worth 30%, not 20%, of your total course grade, and the value of the midterm and final will decrease by 5% each.

For the "objective" portion of the midterm (multiple-choice, true-false, matching, fill-in-the-blank): review authors & titles; characters, speakers, and plots; signficant passages, themes, and events, etc. Required reading for the first half of the semester (i.e., Gronniosaw/Sancho/Equiano through The Lonely Londoners) is fair game. There will probably be somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 questions. (And then I'll send you home with an essay prompt or two.)

Monday, we begin The Lonely Londoners. Look for reading questions on Moodle, and check out both the Required and Recommended resources in the Online Course Reader (because I'm going out of town over the weekend, I may not get to dead or malfunctioning links right away). Fair warning: I'll probably start Monday's class by lecturing a bit.

A couple of belated Crossing The River-related links:

Meet you Monday at Tilbury Docks...

For Wednesday, February 17 (Day 9):

(N.B.: If you missed Monday's class because of the RTA bus schedule, I'll give you a chance to take the Desani reading quiz late.)

On the agenda for Wednesday: the "Somewhere in England" section of Crossing the River. Phillips is doing complicated things with chronology, so be ready to pay close attention, connect some dots, and fill some gaps. (Also: do browse the associated "Recommended" materials in the Course Reader, and have a gander at my reading questions in the latest Moodle discussion forum. Again: we're a day behind the calendar on the syllabus. New due date for Reading Responses: Tuesday, February 16th.)

We'll scratch the 1942 essay by Nancy Cunard and George Padmore entitled "The White Man's Duty: An Analysis of the Colonial Question in Light of the Atlantic Charter," originally scheduled for Wednesday. I never did insert it into the Course Reader, so contact me if you'd like to read it on your own.

Link miscellany:

  • The British Library's resource on "Asians in Britain, 1858-1950" will give you a more detailed (and more richly illustrated) overview than mine of one segment of Asian-British history. (Don't miss the extremely cool Interactive Timeline.)
  • "Modern Britain and the Empire," a site built several years ago as a class project by Harvard undergrad Michael Gribben, has a pretty good section on colonial immigration. Other subpages are worth a look, too. (Since we've been talking about language: don't miss the one on the spread of "British Black English.")
  • Finally: how hair-raising is it to realize that blackface minstrel troupes--commonplace in Britain, as in America, in the late 19th century--were actually still going concerns in Britain on the eve of World War II?

For Monday, February 15 (Day 8):

On to Desani! (We're a day behind now. Reading responses due Sunday the 14th.)

Also: it would be wise to get a big chunk of Caryl Phillips under your belt over the weekend, and to check out the "Recommended" resources for both Desani and Phillips. (I've fixed broken links and added a few new ones. Here's another: "English As She Is Spoke.") I will still ask you to read the assigned chapter by Scobie and the short piece from The Nation in conjunction with Phillips's Crossing the River, but in the interests of catching up, I may scratch the (so far invisible) pieces by Nancy Cunard and George Padmore originally on the calendar for next Wednesday.

Finally, I just re-discovered a couple of resources I meant to hep you to when we were reading Mary Prince, Michelle Cliff, and Edward Said:

For Wednesday, February 10 (Day 7):

Sorry for the late update. (Help Desk came to the rescue at last!) We're mainly in a holding pattern, sticking with Una Marson & CLR James. But go ahead and get started on G.V. Desani anyway, and/or take advantage of the extra time to check out some of the supplemental resources in the righthand column of the most current page of the Course Reader (viz., "The Breeze Before the Storm").

Consider the Reading Response deadline for Desani postponed. I have already opened a Moodle forum, however--and posted some reading questions there.

Finally, to make up for our shortened class on Monday, let me hit you with one more mini-lecture:

For those who didn’t read Scobie, let me take a few more paragraphs to contextualize the presence of Marson and James in England in the 1930s. One of the things Scobie relates is that in the early decades of the twentieth century there was a more or less steady stream of Black students and intellectuals, many of them activists and Pan-Africanist organizers, trickling into England.  (It’s perhaps not coincidental that just when London had most fully realized its identity as what Jonathan Schneer calls “the Imperial Metropolis,” it was also the site of a groundswell of anti-imperialism and Pan-Africanism, led mostly by talented colonials. In 1912 one of them, Duse Mohamed Ali, founded the African Times & Orient Review “to advocate the cause of the coloured races in [Britain].”) Still, as with their late eighteenth-century counterparts, this population of “coloured” students and intellectuals was relatively small, even if their influence was all out of proportion to their actual numbers. (Up through World War II, they probably amounted to no more than a few hundred out of a total Black population of somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000.)

The merchant seamen that I mentioned in my last e-lecture constituted one big segment of that larger population, and throughout the later years of the 1800s and on into the 1900s, as the British economy sunk into recession—and as the white-supremacist ideology that undergirded imperialism became more widespread and took on ever cruder forms—those seamen and their families increasingly became the targets of racial prejudice and discrimination.  There was a brief respite from this growing intolerance during World War I, when fairly large numbers of black West Indians (about 15,000) were recruited into England to fill a wartime labor shortage; they not only worked on the docks but also staffed munitions and chemical factories, though some volunteers served as cannon fodder in Europe.  During the war, they received the praise of a grateful nation for their loyalty and sacrifice. After the war, most of the surviving West Indian servicemen were eventually decommissioned in England—where they were effectively stranded, with not enough money for return passage home—while many of the Black factory workers and merchant seamen lost their jobs to returning white soldiers.  So suddenly there was a lot of competition for very scarce work, and you can imagine how this led to escalating tension:  in 1919, one year after the war, there were violently racist anti-Black riots in Liverpool and Cardiff, and smaller but similar disturbances in London and other cities with Black working-class populations.  And even though many eventually decided to give up and go back to the West Indies, many others stayed on, and consequently racial tensions bubbled and simmered throughout the ensuing decades.

Meanwhile, as more and more bright, ambitious young colonials like Una Marson and C.L.R. James arrived in England, and as they discovered (the hard way) that England was scarcely the enlightened seat of civilization that their good colonial educations had led them to believe it would be (shades of Gronniosaw), they began to see it as their mission

  1. to stand in solidarity with their working-class counterparts (sound familiar?),
  2. to make plain the link between racism in England and political oppression in the colonies (also sound familiar?), and
  3. to agitate for civil rights and racial harmony. 

The Keys, in particular—the small magazine published by the League of Coloured Peoples—was intended (somewhat ambitiously, perhaps) to serve as a mouthpiece for the entire Black community in Britain. Marson, as you’ve read, was the magazine’s first editor, and both she and James published in it.

Anna Grimshaw gave you a bit more biographical background on James, and if you read Scobie you may have gleaned a few other details about Marson, as well. The only other thing I’ll say on her behalf is that like James—and like many other aspiring young West Indian artists and intellectuals in her wake after World War II—she migrated to Britain in order to launch a literary career and to seek the sort of intellectual atmosphere that just wasn’t on offer in the stifling confines of a colonial backwater.  She spent nearly six years in London (1932-37), working primarily as “publicity secretary” for the League of Coloured Peoples (and later for Haile Selassie, as he fought the Italian invasion of Ethiopia from exile in Britain). She briefly went back to Jamaica but returned to England during the War to work in the BBC’s “Colonial Service,” where she was put in charge of a fifteen-minute shortwave radio program (“Calling the West Indies”) that originally consisted of messages from West Indians in London to their families back home, along with readings by Caribbean writers abroad.  The program, beamed back to the Caribbean four times a week, eventually morphed into Caribbean Voices, a hugely influential program that was survived throughout the 1950s. 

Marson, a pioneer of West Indian feminism, was also part of what today we would call a “Black Consciousness” movement, and one of the first anti-racist activists in modern Britain.  The League of Coloured Peoples was a fairly moderate, mainstream organization that emphasized unity and harmony. Contrast that stance with the poem Marson published in The Keys: it begins as a harrowing anecdote, evolves into a burning lecture-slash-harangue, and ends as a prayer that looks conciliatory and forgiving but is seething with anger underneath.  Twenty years before Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, moreover, Marson’s poem dramatizes his “epidermal” consciousness, a sense of alienness imposed from outside.

For Monday, February 8 (Day 6):

I've converted my abandoned lecture portion of Wednesday's class into a short e-lecture. It's meant to fill you in a bit on what was happening over the course of the 19th century, before we quick-march into the 20th with Una Marson and C.L.R. James (Pant! Pant!).

For your part: you could get up to speed on Black British goings-on in the early decades of the 20th century by reading Chapter X of Edward Scobie's Black Britannia in the "Recommended" column of the "Breeze Before the Storm" page of the Course Reader. (I would also highly recommend the Photo Galleries of Pre-War Black Britons and the BBC Documentary on "Caribbean Voices.")

Meanwhile: if you joined a discussion forum for the very first time this week, then you'll hear from me over the weekend. I've opened a new forum for Marson & James.

Links:

For Wednesday, February 3 (Day 5):

We haven't finished with S.I. Martin, I know, but do go ahead and read the assigned pieces by Prince, Cliff, and Said, anyway (and as much of the "supplemental" stuff as you can find time for), and we'll see how far we get. Discussion forum is already open.

For Monday, February 1 (Day 4):

So much to say; so little time! Apologies to anyone who had something to offer but didn't get called on, and thanks to everyone for tolerating a certain degree of ranginess and indirection. Monday's class will be even shorter.

I've opened a new forum (with a few prompts) for reading responses to S.I. Martin's Incomparable World, excerpts of which we take up next. (See the Course Reader, and don't forget the "Recommended" resources in the right-hand column.) Ditto for Forum #3, which pertains to next Wednesday's texts. Those of you who posted to the first forum: you should hear from me by the end of the weekend.

I hesitate even to open this can of worms, but here goes: if you held back from posting to the first forum for fear of having missed the deadline...well, you needn't have (to paraphrase Thelonious Monk). Consider the 8:00 cutoff a loose target, but know that loose doesn't mean infinitely elastic. The idea is still to give me and other folks a chance to see what you're thinking before we sit down together at 9:00 the next morning.

Finally: if you feel as if you just don't have enough to read for next week, then you might want be interested in Dave Gunning's "S.I. Martin's Incomparable World and the Possibilities for Black British Historical Fiction," which spends a fair amount of time on the "salon" set-piece that figures prominently among the excerpts you'll be reading. A sample: "[the] novel...helps to challenge the possible dominance that Equiano et al's chronicles of black people have come to assume, although, as [Sukhdev] Sandhu points out, 'though Equiano's elitism is being teased [in Incomparable World], the idea of literature certainly isn't.'"

For Wednesday, January 27 (Day 3):

Gronniosaw, Sancho, and Equiano (Course Reader). First reading quiz. First Reading Response opportunity (deadline: Tuesday night at 8:00). Guidelines are split between the syllabus and the "Making Your Reading Count" handout, available for viewing and download back at the course Home Page. Even if you're not planning to post a response this time, log on to Moodle anyway, just to (re-)acquaint yourself with the technology and to view the reading/discussion questions that I've posted there. (And the probing, provocative, and observant things that your peers have written.)

Correction: I misspoke. The slave trade was ended in the British Empire in 1807. Slavery itself was abolished in 1833, though emancipation didn't take full effect until 1838.

Links:

For Monday, January 28 (Day 2):

I'll be putting on a dog-and-pony show on Monday. You, meanwhile, could get busy exploring my page of "General Web Resources on Black Britain," checking out the "Recommended" resources on the Introductory page of the online Course Reader (they dovetail with the subject of my lecture), and getting a jump on the required reading for Wednesday.

Also: scour the syllabus and course policies (remember my typo: office hours are MW, not TR), download and print yourself a copy of "Making Your Reading Count," my three-page(!) handout of guidelines for Reading Responses. (Grad students: I'll have some slightly different instructions for you soonish, but these ones won't be wholly irrelevant.) Then: even if you're not planning to post a Reading Response to the first Moodle Discussion Forum, log on to Moodle anyway, just to (re-)acquaint yourself with the technology and to view the reading/discussion questions that I've posted there for the selections by Gronniosaw, Sancho, and Equiano. Check in again on Tuesday night to see what other people have written.

Links:

 
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