Open, Small Lecture—Spring
This aphorism, “We are here because you were there," attributed to British anti-racist activist A. Sivanandan, is the response of contemporary Britons of color to white people who challenge the rights of Britons of color to British residency and citizenship. These resistances come, in part, from the inaccurate belief that Britain was a homogeneously white nation until the mid-20th century and from the ideology that “Black” and “British” are mutually exclusive categories. In fact, there have been people of color resident and participating in British society for hundreds of years; over six centuries, their numbers and their roles expanded steadily in direct relation to the expansion of the British Empire and the colonization of millions of British “subjects” around the world. At its peak in 1922, maps showed the red coloring of Great Britain ruling over of one-quarter of the globe. This course, taught from an anthropological perspective, will explore the ways in which myriad racial categories, including white, have been mutually constituted in Great Britain in the context of shifting cultural, economic, and political circumstances. This will include exploring the differences and conflicts among the four nations that now constitute the nation state that is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland: England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Hands-on class materials will be multidisciplinary (anthropology, history, geography, literature) and multimedia, with a particular focus on visual images, audio, maps, popular culture, and archival documents. We will look at the nature of British Imperial expansion through trade, settlement, and enslavement; but the main focus will be the resulting racialized landscapes in Great Britain. We will look at the lives of free Black people in Tudor times and the means, both formal and informal, by which enslaved people in Britain freed themselves and blended into Black English communities in the 18th century. We will learn about the merchant sailors who came from West Africa; the Lascars (Muslim sailors) from east of the Cape of Good Hope; and the Chinese seamen from Shanghai and Guangzhou, who established the first China Town in Europe in the London docklands in the 19th century. We will also learn about the Black men and women performing on the stages of theatres in England and Wales. Articulations of race, gender, and sexuality will be central, particularly as they play out in family formations. Intersections with class are critical, too, particularly in the 19th century when the burgeoning white middle class used the same racialized discourses lumping together the English working class, Irish immigrants, and “natives” overseas. We will devote a significant amount of attention to the 20th century, with its two World Wars that depended on the labor of colonized subjects. We will look at discourses about “race relations” in Britain after 1948, which include white nationalist movements, government white papers, and some misguided writings by anthropologists, among other things. Finally, we will explore examples of explosions in popular culture created by second- and third-generation children of Commonwealth immigrants and their allies: music genres, including reggae, ska, and two-tone; films such as Young Soul Rebels, Bend it Like Beckham, and The Stuart Hall Project; and literature, including writings by Fathima Zahra, Aizaz Hussain, Paul Gilroy, and Jackie Kay. Each student will attend the weekly lecture and one weekly seminar meeting. Assignments will include biweekly written reflections, leading seminar discussions, and collaborating in group research projects.
Faculty