Future Pasts: British Caribbean Popular Culture and the Politics of History, 1948-1998

This project will be developed through a focus on the link between Black publishing and Caribbean diaspora political and cultural activism in the post-war period. Caribbean migrants were involved in the creation of a number of important newspapers, journals and publishing houses in the decades after WWII. These publications - and the networks of intellectuals, journalists, writers, photographers and community organisers mobilised around them - occupy a critical place in the history of diasporic cultural production and political activism in the period, yet they remain curiously under-studied. Scholarship on figures such as Claudia Jones (Boyce Davies, 2007), organisations such as the Caribbean Artists Movement (Walmsley, 1992; Alleyne, 2002); and the evolution of the Black press (Benjamin, 1995) have begun to address the gap, however there is much scope for a broader analysis of the significance and range of contributions these enterprises made to the political and cultural life of Caribbean and Black British communities, and to British society more widely.
In exploring the articulation of 'reconstructed pasts and anticipated futures' (Scott, 2004) the project will engage with (a) Black publishing as a site of production of new and contested visions of the Caribbean past and future; (b) the transnational circuits that produced those visions, including connections to events and personnel in the Caribbean; and (c) the newspapers/publishers' cultural activism and its role in the production of counter-narratives of history and identity in the 'post-colonial' British context. The project will combine the methodological approaches of cultural history, transnational history and oral history; and will engage with the key debates animating the emerging scholarship on Black British cultural history; the legacies of empire in the 'post-colonial' metropolis; transnationalism and 'black globality'.
(a)The publications under review emerged during significant historical junctures when issues of colonialism and post-colonialism, 'race' and discrimination, migration and the legacies of Britain's imperial past (and present) were brought into sharp relief. An analysis of how these contexts informed the historical narratives produced in these periodicals can shed light on continuities and change in the politics of Caribbean diasporic activism and cultural production; and on the shifting conceptions of 'race', identity, and national belonging they envisioned and helped to shape.
(b)A study of the networks of personnel involved in Black publishing underlines the transnational character of West Indian political and cultural activism in the British context. While recent studies have highlighted the circulation in the UK of ideas and activists involved in US racial politics, less attention has been paid to the cultural, intellectual and political correspondence between the UK and the Caribbean in the second half of the 20th century. Yet diasporic papers were critically attuned to events unfolding in the region, and key contributors travelled back and forth, witnessing watershed moments such as the 1970 Black Power demonstrations in Trinidad or the Grenada Revolution of 1979. These events fed directly into the politics and activism of Britain's Black press, and forged links of solidarity between activists in the Caribbean and in the UK.
(c). Groups such as the Race Today collective and New Beacon viewed culture as an integral resource for social activism and individual transformation. Initiatives such as the Creation for Liberation project, the International Book Fairs of Radical Black and Third World Books, and the Black Education Movement were instrumental in the creation of counter-narratives validating alternative histories, cultures and identities in 'post-colonial' Britain.
The project will thus shed new light on a significant period of post-war Black British history and the legacies of the colonial past in the post-colonial present.