Roots & culture: cultural politics in the making of Black Britain

Abstract

Roots & Culture (2017) by Eddie Chambers is a fascinating read. It tells of the narrative, or more accurately narratives, of the migration of peoples of Caribbean descent to Britain. Many came, lured by the promise of a better life with economic possibilities, and uprooted themselves to make a new start in what they thought of as their ‘Mother Country’. But the reality was starkly different, and it took generations before a black British identity emerged. Many historical narratives of the subject document the Windrush experience, the arrival of several hundred Caribbean immigrants at Tilbury Docks in 1948, which transformed British society, and the precursor of subsequent waves of post-war migration that would continue for several decades. Where Chambers’s study stands out is in his ability to chronicle the detail and everyday experiences of a people in forming their cultural identity, which involved a struggle between dual impulses: the desire to assimilate and the need to resist. Integration into a host country involves these two imperatives: to fit in, if only for the sake of keeping one’s head down and avoiding racism, and the need to discover or rediscover one’s own roots and culture. Chambers depicts this battle vividly as he shows how West Indian migrants competed with white Britons for housing and employment, and how they drew on their culture, music, art, literature and inherited traditions to give meaning to their lives and to form their identities. A key aspect of Chambers’s narratives is the significance of generation when thinking about the experiences of migration and settlement. Firstgeneration subjects encountered a different Britain to that experienced by second or future generations. They sought to form alliances on ethnic and cultural grounds and found spaces to build communities of support. Mundane environments such as black hair salons became one such space. While the first generation lay the foundations for their children, the experiences of the latter, of having to grow up through the education system and to make a future, presented different challenges. The shifts of experiences from generation to generation are reflected in the language used to ascribe identity. In the post-war climate, Caribbean migrants described themselves as being ‘West Indian’. This later became supplanted by ‘Afro-Caribbean’, and then subsequently replaced by a composite term, ‘Black British’ in the late 1970s and 1980s, which departed from the specificity of place of migration, instead indicating the emergence of a political consciousness. Second-generation subjects, most of whom were born in Britain, laid a different claim to Britain. It was their