Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 West Indies to London
- Chapter 2 West Indian Interventions at the BBC
- Chapter 3 London Calypso
- Chapter 4 Ronald Moody, from Primitive to Black British
- Chapter 5 The Race Relations Narrative in British Film
- Chapter 6 Barry Reckord, the Race Relations Narrative, and the Royal Court Theatre
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 West Indies to London
- Chapter 2 West Indian Interventions at the BBC
- Chapter 3 London Calypso
- Chapter 4 Ronald Moody, from Primitive to Black British
- Chapter 5 The Race Relations Narrative in British Film
- Chapter 6 Barry Reckord, the Race Relations Narrative, and the Royal Court Theatre
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I did three talks at a peak listening time: 9:15 p.m. on Sundays, after the 9 o'clock news. The talks were based on West Indian history and its effect upon the culture. … Studio 3A Broadcasting House rang with the birth pangs of a new nation. The 9:15 p.m. programmes were important and the whole nation respected them. Here was West Indian history and culture presented so that the scholastic deficiencies of the listeners went unnoticed. Trinidad was almost unknown. Jamaica and Barbados were known simply for Henry Morgan and rum. At that time it was almost theatrical suicide to say an artiste hailed from the West Indies. I was determined to let people know I came from Trinidad.
This book is about a generation. My subjects are artists, a small and scattered collective, but they viewed themselves, and were viewed, as representatives of that generation. These men and women were unique; they came of age as British subjects in the Caribbean colonies, but as adults were domestic citizens of Britain. In both their careers and their creative work, they built bridges, between the so-called “metropole” and colony, certainly, but they also connect two eras that historians like to imagine as discrete: an era of empire, with its associations of British world power and enforced racial order, and a post-imperial era of decline, insularity, and identity crisis symbolized by the political emergence of a “Black Britain” at odds with mainstream (white) society.
That story has a neglected but vital prehistory: in the first two decades after the Second World War's end, an earlier coterie of artists fused a catholic array of concerns in their work, and found an echo in the British cultural establishment. In doing so, they were less symbols of a racial divide or national angst than a driving force behind a postwar cultural revolution.
In 1986, Carolyn Steedman drew a “landscape” for her self-sufficient— and Tory—working-class mother, who was invisible in social histories of postwar Britain and the working class and thus implicitly viewed as an anachronism. In a similar spirit, this story draws a landscape for many of those first-generation Caribbean migrants who optimistically carved out a space of belonging in British culture in the years before the full effects of anti-immigration legislation made themselves felt.
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- The West Indian GenerationRemaking British Culture in London, 1945–1965, pp. 1 - 21Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2017