Black Oot Here

Francesca Sobande is a writer and senior lecturer in digital media studies at Cardiff University, UK. She is the author of The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and Consuming Crisis: Commodifying Care and COVID-19 (SAGE, 2022).layla-roxanne hill is a writer, curator and organiser, living in Scotland. Her work focuses on anti-colonial cultural contributions, and the way our conditions move us to act. She is also active in the trade union movement, holding elected positions within the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and Scottish TUC (STUC).

Presenting a wit account of the historical Black presence in Scotland, Black Oot Here stages a much-needed conversation concerning the racial and capitalist representation of Scottish nationalism and offers a refreshing process of knowledge production towards a blooming possible decolonial future. Sobande and hill centre Black narratives to expand the understanding of wor(l)ds-making in Scotland as they dissect anti-Black racism and offer an invitation to envision Black lives beyond intersecting oppressions. The methodology is sophisticated to indicate what constitutes data, refusing to quantify experiences, lives and feelings. A creative design is present in the book with a careful curation of images and narratives within the struggle, sitting with the fear, with the movement of home-making experienced by Black lives 'oot here'. The authors subvert the Scottish language, appropriating the vernacular to advance the discussions on anti-Blackness, representation, and nationalism, offering an interdisciplinary contribution to anti-racist decolonial care for academic and activist communities.

• PrefaceList of illustrations Acknowledgements List of abbreviations 1. Tis 'ere tae: A long and winding introduction 2. Scottish exceptionalism, naw: (Re)inspecting Scotland’s Black history3. Yin o' us?: Multiculturalism, “New Scots”, and Black women’s lives4. “No like us, a wee bit different, them pure exotic fowk”: Black Scotland in the media and public life5. Tis nae th' end: Some not so final thoughtsNotesReferencesIndex