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Introduction

Black Handsworth

In 1981 a vision of Africa arrived in a district of Birmingham, Great Britain’s second largest city. In the small garden behind its premises in Handsworth, an inner area to the north of the city, a community center unveiled what it called its “African village.” Replete with thatched huts, climbing plants, and a pond containing a crocodile crafted out of a chain of elm logs, its aim was to disrupt the well-worn stereotypes surrounding those formerly slum neighborhoods that, like Handsworth, had become home to immigrants from Britain’s colonies and former colonies in the postwar years. Pitched as an “African oasis” less than two miles from Birmingham’s central hub of modernist shopping malls and concrete subways, the village was certainly an unusual addition to the city’s postindustrial landscape. But it was in keeping with an internationalist line of vision the community center had adopted since opening in 1978 as the Handsworth Cultural Centre. At the heart of this was an emphasis on an exploration of the transnational networks and movements that made up what has been termed the “black globality.”¹ Inside the center, for example, well-worn posters of Bob Marley and Angela Davis framed a rehearsal space used by a troupe made up of local teenagers who were developing specialisms in Nigerian and Azanian dance. In January 1980 the center raised funds for sixteen young people to visit Jamaica to learn about the island’s culture and meet with grandparents, siblings, and other relatives; three years later, to a predictable outcry about the prospect of a “rain dance on the rates,” more funds were raised, this time to send a group to Ghana to research West African dancing and drumming techniques.²

The center’s primary users were the children of the generation of Caribbean migrants who had journeyed to the British metropole in the 1950s and early 1960s, often drawn to Birmingham because of the labor shortages in the region’s manufacturing and vehicle industries.³ By the time the Handsworth Centre opened its doors in 1978, this generation had become formerly colonial peoples, with the last vestiges of Britain’s formal empire having largely been swept away.⁴ Yet this was an ambiguous moment, something made apparent when, in April 1982, Margaret Thatcher’s first Conservative government embarked on a military conflict with Argentina over the Falkland Islands, a British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic Ocean with a predominantly white population of some eighteen hundred people. The eventual defeat of Argentina helped to stir up a patriotic fervor in Britain that, according to one Conservative minister, “‘finally laid the ghost’” of Britain’s 1956 humiliation over the Suez Canal.⁵

Located on Hamstead Road, a busy thoroughfare connecting Handsworth with the city center to the south and the affluent Handsworth Wood district to the north, the center’s African village was indicative of a different sensibility. It was shaped not only by the black globality but also—as the trips the center arranged to the Caribbean and West Africa suggest—by the lived presence of what might be understood as a “diasporan consciousness.”⁶ These parallel developments, fueled as they were by contrasting transatlantic perspectives, help introduce a particular set of questions. What, for example, was the significance of a community center opening a mock African village as Britain was about to embark on a conflict so intimately connected with its imperial past? In what other ways was this diasporan consciousness manifest in Handsworth, and what does its presence tell us about the experience of being black in 1980s Britain? How did this consciousness impact Britain’s key sites of postwar black settlement, of which Handsworth was only one prominent example? And what can an exploration of the specifics of such a locale tell us about the nature of postcolonial Britain? In this book’s reconstruction of 1980s “black Handsworth,” these are the questions that provide its guiding focus.

Black Handsworth emerged in the context of what has become the familiar story of postwar migration. The 1948 British Nationality Act was a key legislative marker that in theory granted equal citizenship to all subjects across the empire, even if the act was a politically expedient attempt to respond, following the 1947 partition of India, to the growing specter of imperial decline. Prewar black activists in Britain and specifically London often based their campaigns for racial equality on a demand for citizenship rights that materially advanced the status of black populations across the empire. The passage of the 1948 act meant that when the postwar generation became only the latest example of a long-standing tradition of black subjects settling in the imperial “mother country,” they did so as British citizens who could make assertive claims about their right to be there on an equal footing with longtime residents of the metropole.⁷ By 1961, 10 percent of the Handsworth population, or some 2,656 residents, had been born in the “New Commonwealth,” with the vast majority coming from the Anglophone Caribbean. Within a decade, largely as a result of the arrival of migrants from the Indian subcontinent and those Asian communities that had been expelled from East Africa in the late 1960s, this number had almost doubled, to 5,407, or almost 20 percent of the local population.⁸ Taking into account their British-born children, in 1985 close to 60 percent of the Handsworth population was of African Caribbean or South Asian descent.⁹

By this time, Handsworth had become well established in the popular imaginary as one of Britain’s “race relations capitals.”¹⁰ This occurred in the context of the growing notoriety of the British midlands more generally and was closely aligned to an acute sense of disorientation among Britain’s body politic as those who had previously been heavily invested in the status of empire struggled to come to terms with its loss and the simultaneous presence of one-time colonial subjects “at home.”¹¹ An early forerunner was the 1958 riots in Nottingham in the east midlands, during which gangs of white youths attacked members of the growing black community in the St. Ann’s district of the city (events that were quickly followed by similar disturbances in the Notting Hill area of London).¹² Six years later, in the 1964 general election, the Conservative candidate Peter Griffiths won a shock victory over shadow foreign secretary Patrick Gordon Walker in Smethwick, a racially mixed constituency a short drive from the center of Handsworth. Griffith’s overtly racist campaign unsettled the political establishment and for a time helped make Smethwick a watchword for what had apparently become Britain’s heightened climate of racial tension.¹³ This was magnified when in April 1968 Enoch Powell made his often-cited race relations speech at a central Birmingham hotel, using the complaints of his white constituents in nearby Wolverhampton as the basis for a near-apocalyptic vision of racial violence played out on the streets of Britain’s inner cities. His Birmingham speech cemented Powell’s position as one of the country’s most prominent, self-anointed spokespeople on race. By the end of the 1960s, to a backdrop of strikes in protest against his sacking from the shadow cabinet, Powell was advocating the establishment of a new ministry for the repatriation of immigrants.¹⁴

Handsworth itself was properly transposed into the national imaginary with the moral panic over black street crime or “mugging” that, with the enduring influence of Powell and a marked growth in electoral support for the neo-Nazi National Front (NF), followed a particularly violent attack in the Villa Road area in November 1972. Through the close involvement of one of its students in Handsworth, the case captured the attention of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), the influential research unit that had been established in 1964 by the literary critic Richard Hoggart as a space—attached to Birmingham University in the south of the city—for the scholarly research of popular culture.¹⁵ Spearheaded by the Jamaican intellectual Stuart Hall, who in 1951 had made his own journey across the Atlantic to study at Oxford and by the early 1970s had replaced Hoggart as the CCCS director, a team of researchers argued that street crime in areas like Handsworth was functioning as a lightning rod for much more fundamental anxieties about the fracturing of the postwar consensus, the end of empire, and a more general sense of British “declinism.” The understanding of mugging as a supposedly “black,” specifically male crime built on earlier anxieties around black masculinity and, it was argued, was a signal that race had become the prism through which the engulfing sense of crisis was mediated.¹⁶ This was increasingly marshaled by a nationalistic “new” right, which presented its law and order agenda as the solution to the nation’s ills.¹⁷ In an essay published in the run-up to the 1979 general election, Hall outlined what he saw as the connections between the mugging panic and the rise of what he called Thatcherism, and suggested that many of the themes articulated in their most extreme form by Powell and the NF had become a key element of the Conservative Party’s new authoritarian agenda.¹⁸ With the passing of the 1981 British Nationality Act, which effectively abandoned the core principles enshrined by its predecessor some three decades earlier, and with the 1982 conflict with Argentina, the extent to which Thatcher was able to disavow Britain’s imperial past while simultaneously stirring up patriotic, proto-imperialistic sentiment became clear.¹⁹

The status of the black inner city as a violent and near-pathological threat to “British ways of life” was secured following two outbreaks of major rioting at the beginning of the 1980s and again in 1985. Although the unrest in 1981 included Handsworth, the most serious events were in Brixton in south London, which prompted a public inquiry led by Lord Scarman, the former head of the Law Commission.²⁰ But the outbreak of further unrest four years later seemingly confirmed the idea that Britain’s inner cities were in a profound state of crisis, and that race was the primary interpretive mechanism for what was thought to be at stake. The rioting in Handsworth—which took place in September 1985 and was concentrated around the Lozells Road, less than a mile away from the Handsworth Cultural Centre on Hamstead Road—left an estimated £15million worth of damage to property, scores of injuries, and the deaths of the two Asian proprietors of the Lozells Road Post Office. For Margaret Thatcher, reflecting on the events some weeks later, any suggestion that the social conditions of such areas were a contributing factor in the rioting was misleading. Unemployment may “breed frustration,” she declared, but it was “an insult to the unemployed to suggest that a man who doesn’t have a job is likely to break the law.”²¹ Instead, West Midlands Police constable Geoffrey Dear suggested Handsworth’s rioters had been “driven on by bloodlust,” while to the Conservative member of Parliament (MP) Nicholas Fairbairn, the reasons for what had happened were simple: “The West Indians are lazy, the Asians are enterprising. . . . [T]he West Indians are jealous of the Asians.”²² Others argued that the riots offered further evidence that Britain’s inner cities, having already undergone a process of “white flight,” were destined to follow an American trajectory of urban race relations.²³ Handsworth was conceptualized as the “bleeding heart of England,” a front line in what had become a “war on the streets.” Following subsequent disturbances on London’s Broadwater Farm estate and again in Brixton, in the view of another police chief the 1985 unrest constituted “‘the worst rioting ever seen on the mainland.’”²⁴

Inevitably such narratives ignored black perspectives in areas like Handsworth and what it meant to live race at the level of the community and the locale. As historians have come to assess this period, moreover, the emergent historiography has been shaped by a concurrent emphasis on ideological and political developments and the series of social and economic crises that increasingly dominated British political life. In many ways, as has been argued, the enduring emphasis on the implications of Thatcher’s election as Conservative Party leader in 1975, and her three successive general election victories beginning in May 1979, has contributed to a characterization of the period often confined to Thatcher’s own political terrain.²⁵ Black Handsworth: Race in 1980s Britain is engaged with a parallel milieu. In shifting the focus onto a specific urban space, the aim is to foreground the significance of those whom Michel de Certeau described as the “ordinary practitioners of the city.”²⁶ In part, this is a story of how the black practitioners of Handsworth sought to negotiate the practical consequences of the racialized anxieties of a particular postcolonial moment. It is also a study that encapsulates the political campaigns that were fought within black Handsworth to redress the damaging inequalities that existed in areas such as housing and education, as well as the emergence of reappropriated versions of “blackness” that were used as the basis for cultural and political movements. Finally, it represents an examination of a more opaque habitus, of what Raymond Williams characterized as the “impulses, restraints [and] tones” of everyday life.²⁷ This book is about the experience of both living and articulating race in a particular locale: politically, culturally, and in everyday practices and patterns of sociability. In black Handsworth, I argue, this was structured by the routes, ideas, and “open horizons” that constituted the diasporic imaginary. And most significant of all was that this sensibility was being played out on Hamstead Road, Villa Road, Lozells Road, and countless other nondescript, often impoverished inner-city topographies across the country. Away from the political mobilization of what has been termed the “Powellian legacy of guilt-free British nationalism,” and contrary to Britain’s enduring inability to come to terms with the legacies of its imperial past, the black globality was restructuring Handsworth and similar localities across the country. In so doing, the diasporan consciousness was being established as a core presence in the landscapes of postcolonial Britain.²⁸

The period under consideration constitutes what might be understood as a “long” 1980s that reaches back to encompass much of the previous decade. Certainly the mugging panic that erupted in late 1972 not only contributed to a climate in which the politics of Thatcherism was eventually able to thrive. More specifically, it prepared the ground for the heightened anxiety over the black inner city that crystallized around the disturbances of the 1980s. If this discourse had “entirely real” consequences for Britain’s black population in terms of the establishment of a terrain that black people had to occupy, black communities were in this period also able to draw on an expanded range of resources with which to negotiate it.²⁹ This was symbolized most spectacularly by the arrival from Jamaica of Rastafarian reggae music, which had begun to make serious inroads into international markets in the early 1970s. In Britain this helped stimulate the birth of a domestic reggae scene and a cultural revival of a Pan-Africanist imaginary that popularized, often in loose, discursive terms, the political platforms and ideologies that during the interwar period had established London as a locus of Pan-African organization. And there are other factors that mark the period from the early 1970s to the later 1980s as a distinctive conjuncture. By this time, for example, many of the social clubs, churches, and other spaces that had often initially been set up as a first line of defense against the aggressive workings of the British color bar had begun to function as increasingly well-embedded institutions in areas like Handsworth, and as important facilitators of everyday sociability. By 1978 more than half of the black population of Handsworth owned their own homes, and a discernible cohort of young people—who had often been moved to Britain as infants in order to preempt the 1962 introduction of strict immigration controls—were beginning to reach school-leaving age.³⁰ In many ways, these themes are testaments to a significant shift having taken place among the black population, as those who had arrived in Britain as immigrants increasingly recognized themselves as settlers, rather than sojourners, and their children began to reach political maturity. With the passing of the 1976 Race Relations Act, which finally outlawed indirect discrimination in employment, education, and elsewhere, even the government had seemingly recognized the dramatic changes taking place within the “colored population,” a growing proportion of which now constituted people born in Britain.³¹ The consequences of these changes were only beginning to become clear in the context of the long 1980s.

By the 1990s a different atmosphere had seemingly emerged. The racialized moral panics continued, along with the police harassment of black communities and racial violence, of which the 1993 murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence in London is just one shocking example. But this was played out in the wider context of Britain’s multicultural drift: the increasing prominence, particularly in the sphere of popular culture, of black public figures such as the newscaster Trevor McDonald and the footballer Paul Ince, who in the same year as Lawrence’s murder became the first black player to captain the English national team. These examples had little to do with government policy, but they were indicative of an increasing, organic sense of familiarity with diversity in Britain and a recognition—in many cases a begrudging one—that this constituted a “natural and inevitable part of the ‘scene.’”³² By the end of the twentieth century, the official inquiry into the police’s handling of the Lawrence murder had forced civil society into a belated recognition of the endemic problem of institutional racism, while the cultural reach of reggae and Rastafarianism in black communities had long since been overtaken by African American hip-hop and contemporary rhythm and blues (R & B).³³ It is an earlier diasporic formation that concerns this study, as well as its concurrent emphasis on the activities of the Friday night drinker, attendees at a Saturday evening reggae event, and the Sunday morning worshipper. In focusing on the long 1980s, this book takes the story of the black globality in Britain beyond the context of high imperialism that has hitherto largely preoccupied historians.³⁴ In so doing, it unearths a lived experience that testifies to the shifting landscapes of postcolonial Britain.

The African village that in 1981 became a feature of the Handsworth landscape was the brainchild of Bob Ramdhanie, a Trinidad-born probation worker who had run the Handsworth Cultural Centre, to which the village was attached, since its opening three years earlier. Based on one of the area’s busy thoroughfares, which was made up of an increasingly dilapidated Victorian housing stock, to Ramdhanie was a space that could offer creative channels for black youth to navigate their experiences in inner-city Birmingham by locating them within a historical, transnational framework that encompassed the black globality. His “village” was in some ways an inversion of the exhibitions that were commonly held in Britain and elsewhere in the late nineteenth century, in which the ethnological ideologies of empire were communicated to Western audiences through displays of colonial subjects and installations offering supposedly authentic re-creations of native villages and exotic landscapes.³⁵ Ramdhanie’s Handsworth village, in contrast, was aimed at the children of colonial immigrants and envisaged as just one element in a wider initiative that would enable his constituents to express themselves through a Pan-Africanist emphasis on “roots” culture, whether through music, dance, or other art forms. It was to be a space, Ramdhanie explained, where the “people who come and use our Centre, who may be in search of a cultural identity” would have something “more tangible”: a physical nexus within Handsworth’s urban geography.³⁶

With its thatched huts and faux crocodile, the village was undoubtedly unconventional. But it spoke to a much more pervasive ethos in Handsworth, one that resonated on its streets, in the work of its artists and musicians, in the ideologies of its political organizations, and inside its pubs and social clubs. When in February 1965 Malcolm X visited the region, for example, a matter of weeks before his assassination in New York City, his presence acted as a boon to moves already afoot to develop British and regional iterations of Black Power. When eight years later Bob Marley and the Wailers released Catch a Fire, the album’s Rastafarianism-inspired oeuvre helped make African iconography and styles an unmistakable feature of the Handsworth locale.³⁷ By the mid-1980s, the extent to which black Handsworth was shaped by a particular reading of the black globality was, one observer reflected of a visit to the area, emphasized by the colors of the flags and pendants that hung among the cafés and takeout joints on Lozells Road and Soho Road, Handsworth’s main shopping streets, and from the rearview mirrors of its cars. These colors were the Jamaican yellow, green, and black, alongside the national colors of Trinidad and other Caribbean islands; the red, gold, and green of Ethiopia, the focus of Rastafarian and Pan-Africanist thought; and the red, green, and black associated with Marcus Garvey’s historic brand of black nationalism.³⁸ It is this specifically African Caribbean formation that this book seeks to address.

There are important parallels here with the experiences of Britain’s growing South Asian population. In contrast to what has become conventional usage in current popular British discourse, in the long 1980s black often functioned as a label claimed by South Asian as well as African Caribbean communities, as a way of reappropriating the monolithic stereotypes that immigrants encountered in Britain and emphasizing solidarity and mutual sites of political struggle.³⁹ There undoubtedly were numerous issues that transcended both populations, not least the effects of racial discrimination, physical violence, and a worsening economic climate that was felt particularly acutely in Britain’s ethnically diverse inner cities. Moreover, the South Asian formation was also shaped by diasporic perspectives, as Asian communities invoked their own international linkages and made them a feature of the local geography.⁴⁰ However, as I show in chapter 1, the 1980s was actually the period in which a unified black politics was proving to be increasingly unsustainable. The explicitly narrow agenda of Handsworth’s Black Power groups had meshed with the arrival of a Rastafarian moment energized by a particular African Caribbean trajectory. This functioned alongside spaces such as churches and pubs, which were often used to re-create what were understood to be distinctively Caribbean patterns of sociability, with corresponding locations also having been established by the Asian population. This is not to downplay the critical importance of the South Asian experience or the various forms of everyday multiculture that often functioned as a remarkable source of creativity within Britain’s inner cities. But that, alongside the highly complex subject of South Asian ethnicity and the way in which Asian languages and religions functioned in the 1980s, is the subject of an altogether different study. Apart from chapter 1, which deals with black as a “political color,” and unless otherwise stated, for the purposes of this book black is used to refer to a distinctive African Caribbean milieu.⁴¹

Black Handsworth attempts to excavate a particular black “structure of feeling.” Raymond Williams coined the concept to refer to a whole way of living: a set of common experiences actively lived through shared outlooks, identities, and associations, and in forms of politics and everyday cultures.⁴² As Williams reflected, the conjunction between structure and feeling was a deliberate attempt to capture a slippery and apparently contradictory social phenomenon. The notion of felt consciousness gets at a sense of intangibility, leaving room for a significant degree of variation and diversity. In Handsworth, as I demonstrate, the black structure of feeling was manifest variously as political ideology, art, leisure, and everyday practice. In places it was felt most acutely in terms of an increasing emotional nostalgia for the Caribbean and simultaneously a related aspirational desire to be seen to be “getting on” in Britain. Elsewhere, particularly for the black generation that had been born in Britain and was increasingly influenced by the interpretations of Rastafarianism found in the lyrics and on the album sleeves of Jamaican roots reggae, it was Africa and particularly Ethiopia that came to function as the symbolic, “imagined” basis for a modified black cultural and political identity. In Handsworth, therefore, the black structure of feeling was felt in distinct ways within particular locations. It constituted a diverse, though connected, patchwork of communities within which a particular combination of emotions, imaginaries, traditions, and political ideologies operated as the primary guiding force.

Yet on the other hand, this milieu was also structured. It constituted a pattern, a set with “specific, internal relations” that it is possible to “perceive operating.”⁴³ First, inevitably, it was raced. Although there were white activists, artists, and others who identified themselves as allies of Handsworth’s black population, and who are encountered at various stages throughout this book, being black in 1980s Britain meant having to come to terms with what Frantz Fanon encapsulated as the pervasive “fact of blackness” and the profoundly damaging effects of the white gaze: of having to inhabit subject positions generally coded by white society and attempting to both navigate and challenge the material consequences of racial discrimination. “I became black in London, not Kingston,” Stuart Hall reflected, and it was with his move to provincial Birmingham in the mid-1960s that, for Hall, a particularly acute brand of racism came into view.⁴⁴ The climate of the 1980s had in various ways shifted, but with no less serious consequences, particularly for those black people who inhabited what many now conceptualized as Britain’s overtly violent, riotous inner cities.

Second, this was a formation that was also often highly gendered. If the moral panics of the 1980s focused primarily on the image of the young black man as a perennial mugger or rioter, stereotypes about the supposed over-fecundity of black women, coupled with their status as migrant laborers, often meant that they were represented in relation to an almost pathological emphasis—commonly articulated in the postwar sociological literature on race relations—on what was seen to be the fundamental inadequacies of black familial structures.⁴⁵ As I show, women were often able to subvert such narratives through the articulation of assertive versions of black femininity that emphasized respectability, religious spirituality, and the importance of cultural capital in spaces such as the church and the home. This came in the context of the manifestation of the more masculine Caribbean street and reggae cultures as they emerged and were reappropriated in Handsworth, and a political culture in which women activists often found themselves fighting on a number of different fronts. Here, this was not only a project to challenge and attempt to alleviate the damaging effects of societal racism. It also meant having to deal with a male gaze within black organizations and what could often be an unwillingness among some male activists to seriously engage with the highly specific inequalities that black women faced.⁴⁶

Above all, however, the black structure of feeling was shaped by a diasporan consciousness and perspectives that traversed what Paul Gilroy encapsulated as the “black Atlantic.”⁴⁷ This was present in the ideologies of Handsworth’s political organizations, in which the struggles that were waged against domestic racism were understood in relation to global equality movements, both the contemporaneous anticolonial campaigns that were taking place in countries such Angola, Mozambique, and South Africa and a historic frame of reference that took inspiration from the fight against British colonialism and ongoing movements for race equality in the United States. It was there in the work of its artists, who saw themselves as engaged in a process of mapping black Handsworth in a manner that could contribute to the establishment of a visual archive that captured, at street level, the development and contradictions of postcolonial Britain. Finally, it was there in black Handsworth’s lived cultures and patterns of sociability: in the African symbolism at the heart of its reggae cultures and styles, and in the practices that took place inside its pubs, churches, cricket clubs, and domestic interiors that helped establish the diverse and often ambiguous elements of the Caribbean inheritance as a forceful presence in the Handsworth locale.

Cast in this light, the experience of being black in 1980s Britain was a shared one. Running counter to another prevailing historical narrative of the period that sees the political ascendancy of Thatcherism as having corresponded with a growing individualism manifest across myriad locations and settings, in Handsworth, I argue, race was felt collectively as a structure of feeling.⁴⁸ Differently viewed, but avowedly black, it was a social process that had important effects on the contemporary conjuncture. First, the emphasis on diaspora and the black globality provided black Handsworth with a means of navigating and attempting to come to terms with the many inequalities of Thatcher’s Britain. Second, this also posed challenges to popular and political attitudes toward Britain’s imperial past: the enduring inability to come to terms with the black presence as a domestic transformation that was the direct result of Britain’s one-time status as a colonial power, coupled with a widespread nostalgia for that status that was increasingly tapped into by the politics of Thatcherism and illustrated by the popular jingoism that greeted the 1982 conflict with Argentina. In spite of this, as Handsworth’s black community developed its political programs, art forms, leisure spaces, and patterns of sociability, it was establishing a black, transnational sensibility as a powerful feature of the fabric of urban Britain.⁴⁹ It is in this sense that the story of Handsworth’s African village was an apt metaphor for what was taking place around it. As perspectives oscillated between the global and the local, the routes that had once underpinned the empire were coming home. In Handsworth, what this in many ways amounted to was a postcolonial reordering from within. Ultimately, in the specific context of the enduring impression left behind by Britain’s imperial past, this was heralding the unequivocal arrival of black Handsworth.⁵⁰

• • •

This book is about a particular inner-city area of Birmingham and its black population, one that, reflecting more general migratory patterns from the Caribbean, was particularly dominated by people of Jamaican origin or descent.⁵¹ The focus on Birmingham represents a pivot away from the dominant presence of London in the historiography, both in histories of race and immigration and across thematic areas and time frames.⁵² The range of archival material relating to the capital means that its continuing allure for historians is in many ways understandable. Yet given London’s size; specific geographic divisions; nature as a political, financial, and transportation hub; demographic mutability; and mythological status in popular and literary imaginaries, it is—as scholars of London generally concede—difficult to avoid the fact that it generally constitutes an atypical case study.⁵³ At the most basic level, the experience of navigating a city that by the early 1980s had a population more than six times greater than the next most populous cities of Birmingham and Manchester was qualitatively distinctive in ways that presented—with respect to the greater degree of anonymity a metropolis as big as London allows, for example—both challenges and opportunities.⁵⁴ Certainly histories of London commonly have little to say about the experience of inhabiting Britain’s large and medium-sized cities. This is not to claim Handsworth as a district paradigmatic of black Britain. But it was at least broadly comparable in size to what had become identified, outside London, as Britain’s other “race relations capitals”: Moss Side in Manchester, Toxteth in Liverpool, and St. Paul’s in Bristol. 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 demonstrating the ways in which the black globality was used by Handsworth’s 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 locality: marriages, funerals, and political marches. It was thus simultaneously part of an ongoing process of reimagining a black sensibility that was, it was becoming clear, increasingly grounded both in Handsworth and in Britain.

Like all historians, I am an outsider to my subject. Moreover, although the germination of Black Handsworth came with my own formation in inner-city Britain in a different time and space, I have never had firsthand experience of what bell hooks famously described as the “killing rage” that the prevalence of racial discrimination can induce.⁷³ If a key aim of this book is to emphasize the importance of everyday cultures and ordinary experiences, this is not—as Raymond Williams reminded us—to vacate the arena of politics.⁷⁴ The black structure of feeling had far-reaching implications. In the context of the long 1980s and the resolute presence of Britain’s postcolonial amnesia, it was part of a process of confronting Britain with the implications of its imperial past and, in so doing, of moving toward the belated decolonization of the metropole itself.⁷⁵ But the importance of race in 1980s Britain should also be understood on its own terms. What I describe in the pages that follow represents just one manifestation of what might be conceptualized as the “diaspora-ization” of urban Britain.⁷⁶ Propelled by the transatlantic energies of the black globality, this was a process that, paradoxically, was enabling a black community to arrive at a sense of rootedness in the one-time mother country. Black Handsworth in the long 1980s is just one chapter in the continuing story of the making of black Britain.