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This article examines the grassroots Black internationalist organizing of the British Black Panther Movement (BBPM). The BBPM, which was inspired, although not founded, by the U.S. Black Panthers, was a London-based antiracist movement composed mainly of Afro-Caribbean and South Asian immigrants to the United Kingdom. The British Panthers led hundr...
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... The common and deliberate usage of 'Blackness' as a social and/or political identity or "an all-inclusive term for all who experience racism" by a broad spectrum of European citizens-as well as negative reactions to this usage-also factors into Black Europeans' simultaneously open and ambivalent responses towards African America (Obasi 2019, p. 233). The adoption of 'Black' as a strategic choice by South Asian immigrants to the United Kingdom or Dutch citizens of Moroccan and Indonesian descent; the addition of the prefix 'Afro'; the deliberate rejection of such practices; or attempts at new identification markers such as 'Afropean' and 'luso-Africanos' showcase the instability of meanings of 'Blackness' among various national, racial, and ethnic groups within Europe across time and space (Angelo 2018;Bedasse et al., 2020;Guadeloupe 2022;Pitts 2020). During the 1980s, for instance, a hallmark of Black European feminism was its rejection of race essentialism, which partly explains these women's openness to African Americans who shared such views, like Audre Lorde. ...
In this article, we trace the evolution of the connections between Black America and (Black) Europe since the mid-twentieth century and the study thereof. We do so through the lens of ‘Black American centrality,’ referring to the ways in which perceptions of Black America serve as an outsized reference point in European understandings of race, ‘Blackness,’ and Black (European) emancipation struggles. This allows for exploring the dilemmas that the, at times overwhelming, visibility of ‘Black America’ poses to Black Europeans, particularly during the current moment of flourishing Black European culture, politics, and scholarship. In that context, we show how both U.S.- and Europe-based scholars of Black American history and Black European history have approached Black American-European connections differently. The article concludes with suggestions for how these fields can engage with each other to develop academic approaches that account for but do not privilege the position of Black Americans within diasporic exchanges in the North Atlantic region, which is currently an underexplored area in diaspora studies.
... 11 Although small numerically, with groups such as the BPM made up of the tens rather than hundreds, BBP groups were often able to mobilize hundreds and thousands from wider local and national communities for rallies and demonstrations. As Angelo (2018) notes, the rate of activism by groups such as the BPM was high with the staging of over a 100 protests between 1969 and 1973 and over 70 cultural events during this period. ...
The history of the US Black Power movement and its constituent groups such as the Black Panther Party has recently gone through a process of historical reappraisal, which challenges the characterization of Black Power as the violent, misogynist and negative counterpart to the Civil Rights movement. Indeed, scholars have furthered interest in the global aspects of the movement, highlighting how Black Power was adopted in contexts as diverse as India, Israel and Polynesia. This article highlights that Britain also possessed its own distinctive form of Black Power movement, which whilst inspired and informed by its US counterpart, was also rooted in anti-colonial politics, New Commonwealth immigration and the onset of decolonization. Existing sociological narratives usually locate the prominence and visibility of British Black Power and its activism, which lasted through the 1960s to the early 1970s, within the broad history of UK race relations and the movement from anti-racism to multiculturalism. However, this characterization neglects how such Black activism conjoined explanations of domestic racism with issues of imperialism and global inequality. Through recovering this history, the article seeks to bring to the fore a forgotten part of British history and also examines how the history of British Black Power offers valuable lessons about how the politics of anti-racism and anti-imperialism should be united in the 21st century.
Shining a light on the various non‐formal education spaces that have garnered attention in geographies of education over the past two decades, this review takes stock of how historical spaces of education and learning have become a key focus of this body of work. In so doing, the review signals prominent and emergent themes around which scholarship in this subdiscipline has cohered: most notably, geographies of citizenship and morality in informal education spaces, and the radical pedagogic practices of alternative education spaces. As well as looking back, the review also signals two areas that scholars in the field should consider engaging with more closely: Black education and decolonial education. Analysing literature in history and sociology on the Black education movement in Britain, the paper calls for geographies of education to engage more closely with work published in cognate disciplines and not to overlook the relational nature of decolonial education in global north contexts.
The Unfinished Politics of Race argues that the past few decades have seen important transformations in the politics of race. Contending that existing accounts have focused narrowly on the mainstream political sphere, this study argues that there is a need to explore the role of race more widely. By exploring the mainstream as well as transitional and alternative spheres of political mobilisation the authors stress the need to link the analysis of both local and national processes in order to make sense of the changing contours of racialised politics. The underlying concern of this study is to outline both a theoretical frame for an analysis of racial politics, and detailed empirical accounts of different arenas of political mobilisation. By exploring the unfinished politics of race, this study provides a timely reminder that the position of racial and ethnic minorities in political institutions remains deeply contested.
