Dropping anchor, setting sail : geographies of race in Black Liverpool / Jacqueline Nassy Brown.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Brown, Jacqueline Nassy, 1961-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Black people--England--Liverpool.

Black people.

Liverpool (England)--Race relations.

Liverpool (England).

Liverpool (England)--Social conditions.

England--Liverpool.

Physical Description:

xiii, 306 pages ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, [2005]

Summary:

The port city of Liverpool, England, is home to one of the oldest Black communities in Britain. Its members proudly date their history back at least as far as the nineteenth century, with the global wanderings and eventual settlement of colonial African seamen. Jacqueline Nassy Brown analyzes how this wordly origin story supports an avowedly local Black politic and identity-a theme that becomes a window onto British politics of race, place, and nation, and Liverpool's own contentious origin story as a gloriously cosmopolitan port of world-historical import that was nonetheless central to British slave trading and imperialism.

This ethnography also examines the rise and consequent dilemmas of Black identity. It captures the contradictions of diaspora in postcolonial Liverpool, where African and Afro-Caribbean heritages and transnational linkages with Black America both contribute to and compete with the local as a basis for authentic racial identity. Crisscrossing historical periods, rhetorical modes, and academic genres, the book focuses singularly on "place," enabling its most radical move: its analysis of Black racial politics as enactments of English cultural premises. The insistent focus on English cuture implies a further twist. Just as Blacks are racialized through appeals to their assumed Afro-Caribbean and African cultures, so too has Liverpool-an Irish, working-class city whose expansive port faces the world beyond Britain-long been beyond the pale of dominant notions of authentic Englishness. Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail studies "race" through clashing constructions of "Liverpool."

Contents:

Chapter 1 Setting Sail 1

Chapter 2 Black Liverpool, Black America, and the Gendering of Diasporic Space 34

Chapter 3 1981 59

Chapter 4 Genealogies: Place, Race, and Kinship 70

Chapter 5 Diaspora and Its Discontents: A Trilogy 97

Chapter 6 My City, My Self: A Folk Phenomenology 129

Chapter 7 A Slave to History: Local Whiteness in a Black Atlantic Port 161

Chapter 8 The Ghost of Muriel Fletcher 187

Chapter 9 Local Women and Global Men: The Liverpool That Was 215

Postscript: The Leaving of Liverpool 243.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [275]-296) and index.

ISBN:

0691115621

069111563X

OCLC:

54454718

Online:

Publisher description