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Covering the period from the interwar years through the arrival of the steamship SS Empire Windrush from Jamaica in 1948 and culminating in the period of decolonization in the British Caribbean by the early 1970s, this project situates the development of networks of communication, categories of identification, and Caribbean radical politics both in the metropole and abroad. Blackening Britain explores how articulations of Caribbean identity formation corresponded to the following themes: organic collective action, political mobilization, cultural expressions of shared consciousness, and novel patterns of communication. Blackening Britain shows how colonial migrants developed tools of resistance in the imperial center predicated on their racialized consciousness that emerged from their experiences of alienation and discrimination in Britain.
This book also interrogates the ways in which prominent West Indian activists, intellectuals, political actors, and artists conceived of their relationship to Britain. Ultimately, this work shows a move away from British identity and a radical, revolutionary consciousness rooted in the West Indian background and forged in the contentious space of metropolitan Britain.
List of contents
Introduction More English than the English?
Claims-making and Contestations in Britain and Across Empire
Chapter 1. From Small Islands to a Small Island
The Caribbean Background and the Interwar Migrants
Chapter 2. The 5
th Pan-African Congress, Manchester 1945
Black Internationalism in the Context of Britain
Chapter 3. Existentialists Abroad
Legacies of Caribbean Intellectuals in Britain
After 1948: The British Nationality Act and the Multilayered Nature of Caribbean Migration
British Social Science Responses and Student Negotiations
Chapter 4. "We're here, and we're here in a big way": West Indians Respond to the Notting Hill Race Riots
Racial Violence in the Metropole and the Surge of Political Blackness
Chapter 5. Diasporic Artist-Activists and Imperial Reckoning
Academic and Grassroots Responses to Notting Hill
Chapter 6. British Caribbean Independence and The 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act
Caribbean Migrants and the Making of a New Britain
Chapter 7. Black Publishers and Revolutionary Epistemologies
Radical Racial Epistemology and Black Post-Nationalism
Conclusion
"Rivers of Blood" and Black Liberation Dreams
Coda [crisis]: Windrush at 70 and the Hostile Environment
About the author
James Cantres is an Assistant Professor in Africana & Puerto Rican/Latino Studies at Hunter College, CUNY where he specializes in migration, black internationalism, radical politics, cultural formations, and Africana epistemologies.
