Black Handsworth. Kieran Connell

as a “political color,” and unless otherwise stated, for the purposes of this book black is used to refer to a distinctive African Caribbean milieu.⁴¹

      Black Handsworth attempts to excavate a particular black “structure of feeling.” Raymond Williams coined the concept to refer to a whole way of living: a set of common experiences actively lived through shared outlooks, identities, and associations, and in forms of politics and everyday cultures.⁴² As Williams reflected, the conjunction between structure and feeling was a deliberate attempt to capture a slippery and apparently contradictory social phenomenon. The notion of felt consciousness gets at a sense of intangibility, leaving room for a significant degree of variation and diversity. In Handsworth, as I demonstrate, the black structure of feeling was manifest variously as political ideology, art, leisure, and everyday practice. In places it was felt most acutely in terms of an increasing emotional nostalgia for the Caribbean and simultaneously a related aspirational desire to be seen to be “getting on” in Britain. Elsewhere, particularly for the black generation that had been born in Britain and was increasingly influenced by the interpretations of Rastafarianism found in the lyrics and on the album sleeves of Jamaican roots reggae, it was Africa and particularly Ethiopia that came to function as the symbolic, “imagined” basis for a modified black cultural and political identity. In Handsworth, therefore, the black structure of feeling was felt in distinct ways within particular locations. It constituted a diverse, though connected, patchwork of communities within which a particular combination of emotions, imaginaries, traditions, and political ideologies operated as the primary guiding force.

      Yet on the other hand, this milieu was also structured. It constituted a pattern, a set with “specific, internal relations” that it is possible to “perceive operating.”⁴³ First, inevitably, it was raced. Although there were white activists, artists, and others who identified themselves as allies of Handsworth’s black population, and who are encountered at various stages throughout this book, being black in 1980s Britain meant having to come to terms with what Frantz Fanon encapsulated as the pervasive “fact of blackness” and the profoundly damaging effects of the white gaze: of having to inhabit subject positions generally coded by white society and attempting to both navigate and challenge the material consequences of racial discrimination. “I became black in London, not Kingston,” Stuart Hall reflected, and it was with his move to provincial Birmingham in the mid-1960s that, for Hall, a particularly acute brand of racism came into view.⁴⁴ The climate of the 1980s had in various ways shifted, but with no less serious consequences, particularly for those black people who inhabited what many now conceptualized as Britain’s overtly violent, riotous inner cities.

      Second, this was a formation that was also often highly gendered. If the moral panics of the 1980s focused primarily on the image of the young black man as a perennial mugger or rioter, stereotypes about the supposed over-fecundity of black women, coupled with their status as migrant laborers, often meant that they were represented in relation to an almost pathological emphasis—commonly articulated in the postwar sociological literature on race relations—on what was seen to be the fundamental inadequacies of black familial structures.⁴⁵ As I show, women were often able to subvert such narratives through the articulation of assertive versions of black femininity that emphasized respectability, religious spirituality, and the importance of cultural capital in spaces such as the church and the home. This came in the context of the manifestation of the more masculine Caribbean street and reggae cultures as they emerged and were reappropriated in Handsworth, and a political culture in which women activists often found themselves fighting on a number of different fronts. Here, this was not only a project to challenge and attempt to alleviate the damaging effects of societal racism. It also meant having to deal with a male gaze within black organizations and what could often be an unwillingness among some male activists to seriously engage with the highly specific inequalities that black women faced.⁴⁶

      Above all, however, the black structure of feeling was shaped by a diasporan consciousness and perspectives that traversed what Paul Gilroy encapsulated as the “black Atlantic.”⁴⁷ This was present in the ideologies of Handsworth’s political organizations, in which the struggles that were waged against domestic racism were understood in relation to global equality movements, both the contemporaneous anticolonial campaigns that were taking place in countries such Angola, Mozambique, and South Africa and a historic frame of reference that took inspiration from the fight against British colonialism and ongoing movements for race equality in the United States. It was there in the work of its artists, who saw themselves as engaged in a process of mapping black Handsworth in a manner that could contribute to the establishment of a visual archive that captured, at street level, the development and contradictions of postcolonial Britain. Finally, it was there in black Handsworth’s lived cultures and patterns of sociability: in the African symbolism at the heart of its reggae cultures and styles, and in the practices that took place inside its pubs, churches, cricket clubs, and domestic interiors that helped establish the diverse and often ambiguous elements of the Caribbean inheritance as a forceful presence in the Handsworth locale.

      Cast in this light, the experience of being black in 1980s Britain was a shared one. Running counter to another prevailing historical narrative of the period that sees the political ascendancy of Thatcherism as having corresponded with a growing individualism manifest across myriad locations and settings, in Handsworth, I argue, race was felt collectively as a structure of feeling.⁴⁸ Differently viewed, but avowedly black, it was a social process that had important effects on the contemporary conjuncture. First, the emphasis on diaspora and the black globality provided black Handsworth with a means of navigating and attempting to come to terms with the many inequalities of Thatcher’s Britain. Second, this also posed challenges to popular and political attitudes toward Britain’s imperial past: the enduring inability to come to terms with the black presence as a domestic transformation that was the direct result of Britain’s one-time status as a colonial power, coupled with a widespread nostalgia for that status that was increasingly tapped into by the politics of Thatcherism and illustrated by the popular jingoism that greeted the 1982 conflict with Argentina. In spite of this, as Handsworth’s black community developed its political programs, art forms, leisure spaces, and patterns of sociability, it was establishing a black, transnational sensibility as a powerful feature of the fabric of urban Britain.⁴⁹ It is in this sense that the story of Handsworth’s African village was an apt metaphor for what was taking place around it. As perspectives oscillated between the global and the local, the routes that had once underpinned the empire were coming home. In Handsworth, what this in many ways amounted to was a postcolonial reordering from within. Ultimately, in the specific context of the enduring impression left behind by Britain’s imperial past, this was heralding the unequivocal arrival of black Handsworth.⁵⁰

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      This book is about a particular inner-city area of Birmingham and its black population, one that, reflecting more general migratory patterns from the Caribbean, was particularly dominated by people of Jamaican origin or descent.⁵¹ The focus on Birmingham represents a pivot away from the dominant presence of London in the historiography, both in histories of race and immigration and across thematic areas and time frames.⁵² The range of archival material relating to the capital means that its continuing allure for historians is in many ways understandable. Yet given London’s size; specific geographic divisions; nature as a political, financial, and transportation hub; demographic mutability; and mythological status in popular and literary imaginaries, it is—as scholars of London generally concede—difficult to avoid the fact that it generally constitutes an atypical case study.⁵³ At the most basic level, the experience of navigating a city that by the early 1980s had a population more than six times greater than the next most populous cities of Birmingham and Manchester was qualitatively distinctive in ways that presented—with respect to the greater degree of anonymity a metropolis as big as London allows, for example—both challenges and opportunities.⁵⁴ Certainly histories of London commonly have little to say about the experience of inhabiting Britain’s large and medium-sized cities. This is not to claim Handsworth as a district paradigmatic of black Britain. But it was at least broadly comparable in size to what had become identified, outside London, as Britain’s other “race relations capitals”: Moss Side in Manchester, Toxteth