Mohan Ambikaipaker’s “Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain” is distinctive both for its setting and for its personal engagement. Ambikaipaker practiced “activist anthropology” by carrying out “observant participation” as a caseworker for the Newham Monitoring Project, a community activism organization, over the course of two years. The book alternates between anecdotal accounts of racism and the author’s theoretical and historical framing of those accounts. Ambikaipaker’s writing is compelling, his theoretical grounding is thorough, his empathy is apparent, and the fieldwork underpinning it is considerable and consequential.
Articles by Helen Kapstein
Helen Kapstein is an Associate Professor in the English Department at John Jay College, The City University of New York. She earned her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. A postcolonial scholar, her areas of interest include South African literature and culture, cultural and media studies, and tourism and museum studies. Her book Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism: Reading Real and Imagined Spaces was published in 2017 by Rowman & Littlefield International. Current projects include a postcolonial reading of the Brontes’ juvenilia and a series of essays on Nigerian petrofiction. Her work has appeared in Postcolonial Text, English Studies in Canada, and Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, among other venues. She serves on CUNY's University Faculty Senate and is Vice President of the Cultural Studies Association.