Blackening Britain

James Cantres is associate professor in Africana, Puerto Rican & Latino Studies at Hunter College and in the Department of History at the Graduate Center, both of the City University of New York where he specializes in migration, black internationalisms, radical politics, cultural formations, Africana epistemologies, and making Black worlds throughout African Atlantic geographies.

Cantres traces the emergence and consolidation of a radical consciousness among West Indians in mid-20th-century Britain. Drawing on a broad range of primary sources and secondary materials, Cantres begins by looking at the Caribbean situation before and immediately after WW II, including the fifth Pan-African Congress convened in Manchester, UK, in 1945. He describes the initial responses of uprooted intellectuals to living at the geographical center of a declining colonial power. He details the response of both activists and ordinary émigrés to the Notting Hill race riots of 1958, and he explains how such organizations as the West Indian Student Centre accommodated young aspirants to the challenging realities of the British education system. The restrictions of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 helped provoke the emergence of a Black Power movement in the wake of the inflammatory rhetoric of Enoch Powell. The Caribbean Artists Movement organized a conference in 1968 that contested passive assimilation, and groups such as the Black Eagles, led by Michael X, embodied a revolutionary consciousness. The author argues that by the 1970s Black thinkers had created a blueprint for political resistance and autonomy. Recommended.

• Introduction More English than the English?Claims-making and Contestations in Britain and Across EmpireChapter 1. From Small Islands to a Small IslandThe Caribbean Background and the Interwar MigrantsChapter 2. The 5th Pan-African Congress, Manchester 1945Black Internationalism in the Context of BritainChapter 3. Existentialists AbroadLegacies of Caribbean Intellectuals in BritainAfter 1948: The British Nationality Act and the Multilayered Nature of Caribbean MigrationBritish Social Science Responses and Student NegotiationsChapter 4. “We're here, and we're here in a big way”: West Indians Respond to the Notting Hill Race RiotsRacial Violence in the Metropole and the Surge of Political BlacknessChapter 5. Diasporic Artist-Activists and Imperial ReckoningAcademic and Grassroots Responses to Notting HillChapter 6. British Caribbean Independence and The 1962 Commonwealth Immigration ActCaribbean Migrants and the Making of a New BritainChapter 7. Black Publishers and Revolutionary EpistemologiesRadical Racial Epistemology and Black Post-NationalismConclusion “Rivers of Blood” and Black Liberation DreamsCoda [crisis]: Windrush at 70 and the Hostile Environment