Historical study of the African and West Indian Black in the UK from 1594 to 1971 - covers forced labour as domestic workers, legal status, racial discrimination, race relations, racial conflict, racial policy, White attitudes, negro associations, immigration, social integration, employment (incl. As performers, writers, physicians, nurses, etc.), etc. Illustrations and references.

This book analyses how racism and anti-racism affects Black British middle-class cultural consumption. In doing so, it challenges the dominant understanding of British middle-class identity and culture as being ‘beyond race’. Paying attention to the relationship between cultural capital and cultural repertoires, Meghji argues that there are three modes of black middle-class identity: strategic assimilation, ethnoracial autonomous, and class-minded. Individuals within each of these identity modes use specific cultural repertoires to organise their cultural consumption. Those employing strategic assimilation draw on repertoires of code-switching and cultural equity, consuming traditional middle-class culture to maintain equality with the white middle-class in levels of cultural capital. Ethnoracial autonomous individuals draw on repertoires of ‘browning’ and Afro-centrism, self-selecting traditional middle-class cultural pursuits they decode as ‘Eurocentric’ while showing a preference for cultural forms that uplift black diasporic histories and cultures. Lastly, class-minded individuals draw on repertoires of post-racialism and de-racialisation, polarising between ‘Black’ and middle-class cultural forms. Black middle class Britannia examines how such individuals display an unequivocal preference for the latter, lambasting other black people who avoid middle-class culture as being culturally myopic or culturally uncultivated.

This book analyses how racism and anti-racism affects Black British middle class cultural consumption, incorporating insights from critical race theory and cultural sociology.

"Britain's seaborne tradition is used to throw light on the British themselves, the people with whom they came into contact and the British perception of empire. The oceans and their shores, rather than the mysterious interiors of continents, certainly dominated the English perception of the transoceanic world in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, climaxing in the fascination with the Pacific in the age of Captain Cook, and continuing into the nineteenth century, with Franklin in the Arctic and Ross in the Antarctic. The oceans offered much more than fascination. In England, from the late sixteenth century, maritime conflict and imperial strength were seen as important to national morale and reputation and without it there would have been no empire, or at least not in the form it actually took."--BOOK JACKET.

Historical study of the African and West Indian Black in the UK from 1594 to 1971 - covers forced labour as domestic workers, legal status, racial discrimination, race relations, racial conflict, racial policy, White attitudes, negro associations, immigration, social integration, employment (incl. As performers, writers, physicians, nurses, etc.), etc. Illustrations and references.

The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing provides a comprehensive historical overview of the diverse literary traditions impacting on this field's evolution, from the eighteenth century to the present. Drawing on the expertise of over forty international experts, this book gathers innovative scholarship to look forward to new readings and perspectives, while also focusing on undervalued writers, texts, and research areas. Creating new pathways to engage with the naming of a field that has often been contested, readings of literary texts are interwoven throughout with key political, social, and material contexts. In making visible the diverse influences constituting past and contemporary British literary culture, this Cambridge History makes a unique contribution to British, Commonwealth, postcolonial, transnational, diasporic, and global literary studies, serving both as one of the first major reference works to cover four centuries of black and Asian British literary history and as a compass for future scholarship.

Black Popular Music in Britain Since 1945 provides the first broad scholarly discussion of this music since 1990. The book critically examines key moments in the history of black British popular music from 1940s jazz to 1970s soul and reggae, 1990s Jungle and the sounds of Dubstep and Grime that have echoed through the 2000s. While the book offers a history it also discusses the ways black musics in Britain have intersected with the politics of race and class, multiculturalism, gender and sexuality, and debates about media and technology. Contributors examine the impact of the local, the ways that black music in Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester and London evolved differently and how black popular music in Britain has always developed in complex interaction with the dominant British popular music tradition. This tradition has its own histories located in folk music, music hall and a constant engagement, since the nineteenth century, with American popular music, itself a dynamic mixing of African-American, Latin American and other musics. The ideas that run through various chapters form connecting narratives that challenge dominant understandings of black popular music in Britain and will be essential reading for those interested in Popular Music Studies, Black British Studies and Cultural Studies.