This essay queries “political Blackness” as a coalitional antiracist politics in England in the 1970s and 1980s. Contemporary debates on the relevance of political Blackness in contemporary British race politics often forget significant critiques of the concept articulated by feminist and queer scholars, activists and cultural producers. Through close readings of Isaac Julien and Maureen Blackwood’s The Passion of Remembrance and Hanif Kureishi’s Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, this essay examines cinematic engagements with political Blackness by foregrounding the gender and sexual fault lines through which queers and feminists articulated relational solidarities attentive to difference.
Keyword: Great Britain
Review of Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain by Mohan Ambikaipaker (University of Pennsylvania Press)
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.