Book

A significant contribution to the growing literature on Caribbean organisations, activists and writers in the post-war period, from the Manchester Pan-African Congress to the Black Power Movement and beyond.

—Hakim Adi, Professor of the History of Africa and the African Diaspora, University of Chichester

Blackening Britain begins with the taller trees, such as Harold Moody, in the urban forests of 1950s British race relations. From these heights, this comprehensive text plunges its readers into the thick and violent undergrowth, where the struggles of Black immigrants to survive remained for decades at the level of life and death. It closes with Black political and intellectual responses to these bitter racial struggles. Most definitely an informative and engaging read.

—Paget Henry, Professor of Africana Studies and Sociology, Brown University

In Blackening Britain, James Cantres argues that West Indians in Britain did much more than pursue British identity and citizenship. Grounded in a racialized consciousness and pulling from transnational political imaginaries, they rejected the British state as the arbiter of identity construction and cultivated a more radical “post-nationalist perspective.” An important contribution to the growing body of work on Black Britain.

—Monique Bedasse, Associate Professor of History, Washington University in St. Louis

Upcoming events for Blackening Britain

Book Chapters

“Black Power and West Indian Cricket: Exercises in Post-Nationalism,” in Regional Discourses on Society and History: Shaping the Caribbean, eds. Jerome Teelucksingh and Shane Pantin (New York; Oxford: Peter Lang, 2020) 45-64.

Articles

“Articulations of displacement and dissonance from Compton: Kendrick Lamar in the twenty-first century,” Global Hip Hop Studies, Vol. 2 No.1, June 2021: 93-114.

“Black Spaces in Britain: On the Windrush and Small Axe,” Black Issues in Philosophy, Blog of the American Philosophical Association, January 19, 2021.

“The Black Rebel Athlete: Spectacle and Protest,” Public Books, January 2021.

"Existentialists Abroad: Stuart Hall and West Indian Students in the British Universities,” African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, Special Issue: “Hybridizing and Decolonizing the Metropole: Stuart Hall, Caribbean Routes and Diasporic Identity,” March 2018.

“Never Tired of Running,” Fashioning the Self, December 2018.

Book Reviews

Migrant Modernism: Postwar London and the West Indian Novel, J. Dillon Brown, Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 61, No. 4, December 2015.

The Lost Gospel: Christianity and Blacks in North America, Jerome Teelucksingh; British Journal of Canadian Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2, 2012.

Africans in Europe: The Culture of Exile and Emigration from Equatorial Guinea to Spain, Michael Ugarte; The Afro Hispanic Review, Vol. 30, No. 1, Spring 2011.

Other Writing

Press Release: In the Eye of the World, 2020.