Introduction

      Social Movements and Activism
      Cultural Politics
      The Empire Comes Home, and other Sociological Discontents
      Redressing Omissions and Absences: the 'Heroic Generation'
      Critical Humanism
      Biographical Narrative
      On ethics
      Plan of the Book
      On Terminology 

We can live together only if we lose our identity.
Alain Touraine

New Beacon bookshop is situated, in June 2001, on the ground floor of a four-storey building at number 76 Stroud Green Road, a five-minute walk from the Finsbury Park underground station, north London. The bookshop has been at that location since 1973. New Beacon Books was started as a publishing house in August 1966 by John La Rose with the support and assistance of Sarah White. A survey of the ‘50 Best Specialist Bookshops in the UK’, carried out by the The Independent (22-28 July 2000), refers to New Beacon as ‘Britain’s oldest black-interest bookshop’; this is true but indicates only part of the work which is the subject of this book. The shop’s reputation and clientele extend beyond Britain, including the Caribbean, North America, continental Europe, and parts of English-speaking Africa. New Beacon is a specialist bookseller, concentrated in the areas of Black British, Black American, Caribbean and African fiction and non-fiction. Apart from serving the general public, the shop caters to the needs of students of all ages, teachers and researchers, and librarians.

The people who form the subjects of this book are engaged with a wider network of social movement organizations which operate both within and against the dominant paradigms of race and ethnic/community relations deployed by the British state and media. Much of their activist work has centred around imagining and mobilizing toward a radical-democratic, post-racist and post-‘classist’ Britain. In representing the ideas and projects of the circle as I do in this book, I construct a narrative that is part of larger narratives on the post-war history of migration and settlement in Britain, the cultural politics of anti-racism and the New Left from the 1960s, and beyond to various strands of socialist politics that span the Atlantic part of the world system. People who have been involved in some or all of these projects, and who have remained in close association with John La Rose and Sarah White, constitute what I term the New Beacon circle. This is my own rubric, not theirs; I use the term New Beacon, because New Beacon Books book shop was in a sense the locus around which I came to learn about the people and their projects. They constitute a circle, I argue, because they came together on various projects, sometimes because of prior friendship or kinship links, but other times meeting for the first time because of these projects; they have remained in contact through friendship, kinship, professional, and ‘comradely’ links.

Social Movements and Activism

I use the term activism to refer to a type of politically-oriented action that is conceived and deployed largely outside of established state structures, especially legislative assemblies (della Porta and Diani 1999: Chapter 1). The type of political activity that is most often indicated by this term in highly industrialized societies of the world system is mainly that connected to the so-called new social movements, which have had a major impact on politics in Western societies: concerned with gender, ethnicity, the environment, sexuality, globalization and more (Castells 1997; Diani 1995; Green 1997; Melucci 1996; Starr 2000; Touraine 1977). These are social movements because they operate on the terrain of civil society. Their aims are political insofar as they are about wanting to bring about shifts in the balance of power; they have sought to politicize aspects of social existence - race, gender, sexuality for example - that have not been seen as expressly political in both liberal and some forms of conservative political theory and practice. But activism is broader in scope, both temporally and spatially, than is implied by the strictest meaning of new social movements. There is some overlap between old and new social movements, best exemplified by the long tradition, in Western countries, of left-wing activism - itself exemplified by the labour movement - where the class structuring of society has been contested by agents employing tactics from outside of the established arrangements (Calhoun 1982); this is sometimes overlooked by students of and participants in new social movements (Eyerman and Jamison 1991: 78-88).  

Social movements, whether thought of as old or new, are by no means unique to the West (Tarrow 1998). In what are now the (officially) ex-colonial parts of the modern world system, there have been myriad challenges to the existing orders that can be termed activism; some such challenges, perhaps most famously the anti-colonial struggles of Gandhi and his followers (Fox 1989), were direct action par excellence. In the South of the world system, yesterday’s anti-colonial struggle mobilized many ideas and actors similar to today’s struggles for the rights of indigenous peoples or against destruction of the environment by multinational corporations. The anti-capitalism, anti-globalization movements see activists in the North and South of the world system making alliances (Starr 2000). The anti-slavery movement and the women’s suffrage movement were two examples of activist movements that spanned long periods and were truly international in scope; more recent struggles against racism and patriarchy span old and new social movements. Blackburn’s (1988) account of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British and French anti-slavery movements describes methods that are strikingly similar to those of 1990s social movements - the abolitionists employed the printed media, lobbied officials, mobilized intellectual resources and built coalitions of interests. D’Anjou (1996) makes the case for seeing the British abolition campaign of the late eighteenth century as an instance of a social movement simultaneously caught up in and affecting cultural change. He demonstrates that while there were pockets of resistance to Atlantic slavery from its very inception, it was only when the abolitionists were able to articulate their campaign with social and cultural changes in British society which saw the spread of ideas of possessive individualism, a gradual opening up of democracy, and the growth of liberal ideas on trade and production, among other factors, that they began to make inroads against the institution of the slave trade.

Cultural Politics

Cultural politics as a label has come to increased prominence in political discourse since the anti-war, student, women’s, and Black power movements came to the fore in the 1960s (Caute 1988; Harman 1988). Cultural politics is definitively the politics of these new movements, for which alienation was perceived as the greater threat to human happiness than exploitation, thus shifting the focus of revolutionary thought and action from the strict economic domain of society to its interconnected cultural formations. A consequence of this shift was the constitution of a kind of politics that attacks, for instance, the exclusionary distinction of high and low culture, and further, foregrounds the way in which elite groups value the cultural capital which they possess while devaluing that of those subordinate to them in a given social formation. This kind of politics opens up to contestation the way in which cultural products are consumed and how cultural artefacts are produced and interpreted. An important site of cultural politics has been struggles over the representation of persons, their histories, and social relations. Another has been struggle over socialization and cultivation of human subjects.

The Empire Comes Home, and other Sociological Discontents The contemporary Black and Asian population in Britain was constituted mainly as a result of post war migration. The body of work done by sociologists and anthropologists on this migration has tended to view migration to and settlement in Britain in terms of persons moving in order to better their life-chances (Harris 1993; Miles 1982; Patterson 1969; Peach 1969; Rex and Tomlinson 1979; Thomas-Hope 1992). During the heyday of African, Caribbean and Asian migration to Britain (roughly from 1948 to the mid-1970s) most migrants were of working-class or peasant background; they took jobs in the openings at the lower end of the British labour market, openings which had been created by the post-war labour shortage and economic boom.

Though post-war migrants to Britain came from European as well as non-European homelands, in the post-war period it is migrants who were ‘non-European’ who came to be seen as constituting a migrant 'problem' and requiring special policy and legislation. The arrival of large numbers of Black and Asian people after the Second World War created problems for the notion of British identity, as well as complicating the identity of those Black settlers themselves.

Redressing Omissions and Absences: Reconstructing the Lives and Work of the 'Heroic Generation' Notwithstanding the fact that most Black migrants to Britain after the Second World War were working- class, it is also the case that a minority of migrants from the New Commonwealth, including those from the Caribbean, were well-educated persons seeking intellectual careers either through the route of higher education or as freelance creative artists. Less attention has been devoted to this subset than to the overall group of migrants. This lack of interest in the intellectual activity of Caribbean migrants to Britain stems partly from forms of Eurocentric reluctance to grant Black people (as other historically subordinate people in the world system) the social and cultural complexity which is reserved for people of European descent (Wolf 1982). The anthropologists have been most often guilty in this regard (Rigby 1996), but the sociologists are not blameless, as Benson (1996) reminds us. Even students of British cultural studies - a field willing to see Blacks in Britain as more than a labouring mass - have shown little interest in the cultural and political activity of the adult Black population of Britain. Instead, they have focused on the more rebellious and visible Black male youth population (Hebdige 1987; Jones 1988): this may be partly explicable by the fascination of cultural studies with popular culture and youth, and its relative disinterest in more 'dated' forms of resistance such as trade union activity. A related explanation may be rooted in the assumption by many students of political activism that as people grow older they become less politically active (Andrews 1991).

In a review of the development of British Cultural Studies (BCS), Roxy Harris (1996), himself a member of the New Beacon circle, has pointed out that while BCS opened spaces for cultural analysis it has overlooked the achievements of the adult Black working- class population of Caribbean descent in Britain - what he calls the 'heroic generation'. Harris commends BCS for recognizing that the British-born children of Black migrants, frustrated as they are by relatively limited opportunity for socio-economic advance (as are all working-class youth) and also by discrimination/marginalization, constitute - along with elements of White working-class youth - a potentially revolutionary force, but that recognition has been gained at the price of overlooking the activism of the parents of these Black youth.

For Harris, the omissions and absences have occurred for three reasons: first, as noted above, BCS work on Blacks in Britain has centred on the visible, rebellious youth; secondly, and as a consequence, the adult Black population are deprived of a sense of agency and come to be seen as a reactionary force in Black communities; thirdly, the concentration on Black youth has obscured the concrete contributions made by their elders in contesting Britain racism and classism (Harris 1996: 339). In this regard it must be borne in mind that the Black people who fought racists in Notting Hill in 1958 were parents by the time the 1981 Brixton riots occurred: action at street level against racism did not begin in 1981. Relatively overlooked too has been the political and cultural work, less visible than rioting youth and less exciting perhaps than Black popular music, of Black migrants and their descendants in community groups, trade unions, churches, and supplemental schools.

This book is intended to address these omissions through constructing an ethnographic-biographical account of the ideas and practices of a group of socialist intellectual-activists who have struggled to open cultural, political and social space within the British nation for those who arrived after the Second World War.

Critical Humanism

I have written from the standpoint of a critical humanist sociology (Plummer 2001: esp. chapter 1) . It may appear strange to invoke the term humanism in the social sciences, given that so much intellectual energy since the 1960s - and not only in France - has been devoted to challenging its claims and proponents. In doing so I do no more than indicating that my commitment is to a focus on human beings as agents, though structurally and historically constrained, who seek actively, through culture, to feel at home in the world. Persons are to an extent shapers of their worlds, but not always in ways they fully understand or are in control of; while pursuing this perspective we need to be critical of people’s own claims of agency.

My conception of a critical humanism is a modest one. It is a form of humanism because it assumes that persons can and do imagine projects intended to transform their social world, that such projects may be collectively worked out, and such projects may sometimes succeed. The critical elements inhere in my not taking it as given that people always get what they intended, or are always certain what they intended, or better, are always capable of articulating this to other people. My idea of critical humanism is not based in a naive empiricism, but I do insist on humans as agents and as ends in themselves, though not the ends of sociological inquiry. In trying to write a person-centred sociological account (Bowring 2000), I am not dismissing the post-structuralist attack on humanism and ideas of the subject (Poster 1984), but merely taking a pragmatic position within a range of possibilities.

Biographical Narrative

Personal narratives may be constituted from many different sources: diaries, journals, letters, photographs, official records, and oral testimony; in the case of the autobiography, the subject takes it upon him- or herself to write down his or her own memories. However, much of the life histories produced by historians, anthropologists and sociologists have employed techniques of oral history in collecting their data. For these personal narratives, the material did not exist in written form until an ethnographer/historian transcribed the oral testimony of the subject. For Paul Thompson, oral history is 'the voice of the past', and the subjects of oral histories are living, breathing sources (Thompson 1978). For research work in non-literate communities or, more commonly, for work with social groups or persons who, though literate in the formal sense, have not kept any systematic documentation of their lives, oral history is an important research tool.

Two notions were especially important in my work because they connect my attempt to work as a critical humanist with my use of biographical narratives; the two concepts are imagination and of the life seen as a project. The exercise of imagination is critical to any ethnographic work, as is the willingness to take our interlocutors as ends in themselves, even though we know that their knowledge and skills - as our own - are sometimes incomplete and inadequate to the tasks at hand.

C.W. Mills wrote of what he termed the ‘sociological imagination’ that it ‘should enable its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals’ (Mills 1959: 5). Mills held that the central problem to which social science should address itself is that to do with the relation between 'private troubles' and 'public issues'; this relation had become sharply problematic owing to modernity's strict separation of public from private spheres. Mills analysed the rise of bureaucratic and technical structures in modern society, showing that while on the one hand they permitted great improvements in the material well-being of most people in the developed world, on the other they had the unfortunate effect of isolating the individual amid impersonal processes and organizations. This contradictory experience of modernity ought to be addressed, according to Mills, by an imaginative standpoint that sought to understand how the individual biography was related to social structures and historical processes.

The question of locating the human subject in the structures of modern society was also a central concern of Jean-Paul Sartre (Sartre 1963). He wrote of the 'project', of the individual life seen as a project, involving the striving of the individual to realize a self within the possibilities and constraints of modern society. To write a meaningful biographical study for Sartre was to seek to understand life projects; in this regard he proposed the 'progressive-regressive method'. The progressive dimension of this method looks forward to the conclusion of a set of acts or actions, it relates to the desires of the subject. For Sartre, it is essential in order to understand the individual life that we can give some account of what the subject desired, of how the subject sought to shape his or her own life. The subject is generally able to articulate this progressive dimension in terms of desires, but in order to address questions of 'why' the subject conceived and sought to realize this and not that other life-project, it is necessary to construct a regressive dimension to the life history. This regressive dimension looks back to historical, cultural and biographical conditions that moved the subject to take actions, and that shaped the context in which life projects emerged. Sartre's notion of the project and of progression-regression provides an approach to the conceptualization and study of human agency in a given social structure which complements Mill's sociological imagination.

On ethics

There is affinity between the approach I seek to develop by drawing on Mills and Sartre, and the autonomous and culturally-sensitive Marxism of C.L.R James (Buhle 1989). Hovering over all is the benign ghost of Antonio Gramsci (Davidson 1977; Femia 1981). While these writers and tendencies are quite distinct and complex and certainly did not agree on many issues of theory and practice, I do see them as sharing a common focus on understanding people as agents in social life, constrained and empowered by various structures. They have in common too a socialist commitment to social transformation.

The issue of ethics cannot be avoided by any field researcher in the social sciences, especially one who was as closely involved with field respondents as I was. I tried to avoid using interlocutors as objective data sources. I do not judge the morality of their projects or of their representations. Indeed, this account would have been very different if I did not have some theoretical and political affinity for their work. They made it clear to me that they would not be willing to work with any researcher who did not empathize with their politics. I am aware that making this admission means that I am greatly distanced from the objectivist model of scientific enquiry. But such were the conditions of my research. Had they not been met I would not have been able to work with the people I did. In short, I was allowed access to their milieu because they were assured that I was to some degree supportive of their projects, and to some degree I came to share their political imagination.

Plan of the Book

This book is partly an exercise in translation: I attempt to translate among activist, sociological and various political discourses. The work of Chapter Three is partly to begin translating the projects of the circle into sociology of social movements. I discuss the deployment and management of informational, social and cultural resources by the circle. A key social resource is the range of connections and memberships of the individuals who make up the circle; I illustrate this metaphorically by drawing on ideas about social networks. I then consider the activist work of the circle as cognitive praxis (Eyerman and Jamison 1991): the constitution of a world view and a related set of technical and organizational strategies by means of which activist ideas are translated into action.

Chapters Four and Five are connected ethnographic-biographical discussions. In both, I have followed Sartre’s (1963) approach to doing life history; he advocated that we ask: what kind of person can the subject of our interest be in order to produce the personal narrative before us? In seeking to answer this question, Sartre advocates that we examine, where available, personal narratives written by the subject’s contemporaries, and attempt to connect these to other social and historical writing on the subject’s milieu. In this way we can construct a plausible and suitably nuanced representation of our subject as an individual in history and within society.

Apart from these considerations, there was one major ‘on-the-ground’ reason for my employment of biographical representation: when I first came to know them in 1996, most of the core members of the New Beacon circle were middle-aged or nearing retirement age, and as such were given more to reflection and consolidation than to vigorous militancy. In a sense, I met them when their ‘streetfighting years’ were over. This does not mean they were inactive by any means, just that their activism was more laid back than it would perhaps have been if I had first met them in 1966 or 1976, rather than 1996. According to their own testimonies and other documentary sources, in years past they were quite militant and often active at the level of street protest - some of them even faced arrest. My understanding of where most of them were in their life cycles - middle age to early retirement - conditioned the way I went about constructing this account.

Chapter Four elaborates an interpretative mini-biography of John La Rose. The focus on La Rose is justified because he is the leading figure of the New Beacon circle and has had a major influence in formulating the circle’s ideas and practices. I show that La Rose’s life story is dialogical: his present life narrative speaks to his remembered past in colonial Trinidad, from which he draws rhetorical resources to elaborate and justify his self- conception as an activist. His conceptions of the capacity of culture to effect social change are important elements in his personal narrative; his cultural praxis is made visible by his own theorizing of politics and also at those points when he reflects on his own roles in various projects of the circle. I do not present his subjective account of his lifework as a history of radical Black politics in Britain over the last four decades, nor even as a partial substitute for such a history. Rather, I explore activist ideas and practices from the vantage point of the life history because that point offers possibilities of engaging the question of why people chose to engage in activist work, in La Rose’s case virtually full-time for a life in its seventh decade at the time of writing.

In Chapter Five I widen the focus out from one individual to several, necessarily having to sacrifice biographical depth for width of coverage. I demonstrate how personal narratives have been used as a political and cultural resource by the circle, building the discussion around two series of public life-history presentations organized by the circle in 1997 and 1999. My account of these presentations looks at the way personal achievement and race/class identity are constructed in the narratives. I also consider the narrative presentations as ‘performances of the self’ that combine elements of pedagogy, entertainment and testimony. In Chapter Six I conclude the book.

On Terminology 

While conceding its widespread current use in British media, popular and policy discourse, I dislike and do not use the currently popular term ‘Afro-Caribbean’, which is often used as a generic marker for anyone of ‘Caribbean ancestry’. This label implies to my mind ignorance of the fact that many thousands of British nationals of Caribbean descent are mis-categorized, in the sense of the region from which they or their forebears migrated to Britain, as ‘Asian’ because of their phenotype (Vertovec 1993).

One of my motivations in pursuing this research was a felt need to challenge currently fashionable discourses of ‘cultural difference’ which totalize people into ‘communities’, and serve to reinforce historically and theoretically untenable notions of immutable difference between things called ‘cultures’, ‘communities’, ‘ethnic groups’ and ‘races’. In talking about my work, I have frequently had to disabuse persons of the notion that I had carried out research on or in ‘the Afro-Caribbean community in London’. While such an entity certainly exists in many persons’ minds (and may even exist in London) my research as reported here has very little to say directly about it.

Not being able to steer clear of the minefield of racial, ethnic and national identity, I do the following: I use the terms 'Caribbean', ‘West Indies’ and ‘West Indian’ to refer to the English-speaking or Commonwealth Caribbean; African-, Asian-, and Caribbean-heritage (sometimes West Indian) to refer to persons living in Britain who trace their ancestry to Africa, Asia and the Caribbean respectively. While I would have preferred to avoid their use altogether, I do write about ‘Black’, ‘White’ and ‘Asian’ when referring to individuals and groups. The boundaries of these terms are unclear and my work did nothing to make them any clearer. It is my hope that these terms will make sense when considered within their overall structural relation to my narrative. These race-colour terms - particularly Black and White - are manifestly imprecise and even confusing, often conflating notions of phenotype, putative genotype, nationality, race and ethnicity (there are, for example, Black Europeans and White Caribbeans and Africans); but they are nonetheless socially grounded and widely used in myriad situations. None of these terms is fixed - each is a contested identity and some persons among my field informants do not fit neatly under any of these rubrics. Nonetheless, I use these terms because they remain those with which many if not most people in contemporary Britain identify themselves and others.

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Copyright Brian Alleyne 2003. All rights reserved.