Ornette D Clennon – författare

​This book provides an interdisciplinary analysis of UK African Diaspora health seekers and their sustained health inequalities in the health market. It translates their often-silenced voices into a decolonial praxis, where their experiences illuminate the hidden factors that have blighted change in health outcomes for these communities. The book excavates and breaks down the nature of these hidden factors, as historical patterns of behaviour that comprise whiteness over the longue durée. Using the lenses of decolonial and critical race studies, the book places whiteness within an ethical and moral framework in order to examine the hidden factors behind health inequalities.  The book also looks at intersectionality and discusses whether it is actually fit for purpose as an analytical framework for discussing the health seeking behaviours of both Black men and Black women in relation to their unequal access to the health market.

This book  explores the relationship between "the roles of the Black “organic intellectual” and the PoC academic scholar, and outlines how important partnerships are emerging from these sometimes-contrasting decolonial praxes. By blending the decolonial processes of Indigenous rights via a liberation Psychology lens, Brazilian critical race scholarship and UK African diasporic collective consciousness via intersectional critical race studies, the authors  provide a clear theoretical framework to show how a decolonised multi-layered community epistemology can be produced by the community for the community that in praxis form, can be employed for the fight for social justice within those communities.

This book draws on case examples of contemporary black activism in South Manchester and contrasts them with events that surrounded C.L.R. James and his activism between 1935 and 1950. In doing so, the author considers what Brexit, the Labour Party and Theresa May’s audit on racism in the UK have in common with the wartime decline of the British Empire, the rise and fall of the trade unions and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Clennon dialogues with James’ theoretical frameworks around capitalism, neoliberalism and post-colonialism, and uses this creative interplay of ideas to help make sense of contemporary events and issues of social justice from a UK ethnic minority perspective. Using Fanon, Gordon, Marx and Chakrabarty amongst others, the study explores James’ take on dialectical materialism and uses this as an ongoing analytical tool throughout the volume with which he weaves an uneasy path between post-colonial and post-Marxist theories.

The Polemics of C.L.R. Jamesand Contemporary Black Activism will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of social science disciplines, including sociology, cultural studies, education and black studies.