Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool

321 Pages·2005·1.74 MB·English

by  Jacqueline Nassy Brown

Dropping Anchor,
Setting Sail
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Dropping Anchor,
Setting Sail
G E O G R A P H I E S O F R A C E I N
B L A C K L I V E R P O O L
J A C Q U E L I N E N A S S Y B R O W N
P R I N C E T O N U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S
P R I N C E T O N A N D O X F O R D
Copyright ©2005 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press,41 William Street,Princeton,New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom:Princeton University Press,3 Market Place,Woodstock,
Oxfordshire OX20 1SY
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brown,Jacqueline Nassy,1961–
Dropping anchor,setting sail:geographies of race in Black Liverpool / Jacqueline Nassy Brown.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-691-11562-1 (cl :alk. paper) – ISBN0-691-11563-X (pbk. :alk. paper)
1. Blacks—England—Liverpool. 2. Liverpool (England)—Race relations.
3. Liverpool (England)—Social conditions. I. Title.
DA690.L8B76 2004
305.8961(cid:2)0427(cid:2)53—dc22
2004044426
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Times
Printed on acid-free paper. (cid:3)
pup.princeton.edu
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
F O R M Y M O T H E R , M I N G A ,
W I T H A L L M Y L O V E
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C O N T E N T S
PREFACE ix
CHAPTER ONE
Setting Sail 1
CHAPTER TWO
Black Liverpool,Black America,and the
Gendering of Diasporic Space 34
CHAPTER THREE
1981 59
CHAPTER FOUR
Genealogies:Place,Race,and Kinship 70
CHAPTER FIVE
Diaspora and Its Discontents:A Trilogy 97
CHAPTER SIX
My City,My Self:A Folk Phenomenology 129
CHAPTER SEVEN
A Slave to History:Local Whiteness in a Black Atlantic Port 161
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Ghost of Muriel Fletcher 187
CHAPTER NINE
Local Women and Global Men:The Liverpool That Was 215
POSTSCRIPT
The Leaving of Liverpool 243
NOTES 250
REFERENCES 275
INDEX 297
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P R E F A C E
“WHY LIVERPOOL?” Since American friends and colleagues often ask me how I
chose to study Black folks in this place, it makes sense to begin with a medita-
tion on that question. The query is actually apropos for a book that is about spa-
tial knowledges. What is it that Americans know or don’t know about England
that would consistently prompt that query?
In 1987, a few weeks before leaving my hometown of New York City to
attend graduate school in anthropology at Stanford University, I met a Black
Londoner, Ingrid Pollard. Ingrid is a photographic artist of renown in Britain,
and my initial curiosity about Blacks in that country was born in the context of
our friendship. I confess that she was totally exotic to me. I had never heard an
English accent issuing from a Black person’s mouth. I’m embarrassed to admit
that Ingrid only made sense to me when she finally told me that her parents were
from Guyana, where Ingrid was also born. I remember vividly how that knowl-
edge filled me with relief. How provincial I was! Now that I could place her in a
“Black”country,my racial map of the world was put nicely back in order.
I moved to California,and Ingrid returned to London. From there,she sent me
a set of books about race and nationalism in Britain that determined the course of
my life. If it were not for those books,this one would be about Brazil. As a Black
American, I had never been forced to think about race through nation precisely
because in the United States there is no discourse about Black Americans’Amer-
icanness. Blacks get swept into (and away by) American nationalism rather than
cast on the other side of it,as has been the case in Britain. Is there anyone in the
United States who seriously believes that we are out of place? That we all really
belong elsewhere? Or that we are not central to the national community even,
ironically, in our marginality? I do not deny that there have been moments, par-
ticularly in every war since the American Revolution, when these questions
would have been answered very differently. Nevertheless, the Black American
case cannot compare to the Black British one. The latter term,to some,is an oxy-
moron. “Black English” is a near impossibility. Being “just” English—without
the Black qualifier—is unheard of. I needed to know more about how Black peo-
ple understood their relationship to Britishness and especially Englishness,since
that is far and away the more racially weighted category.
Why Liverpool? In the summer of 1989,I stayed at Ingrid’s house while doing
exploratory research in London. I hung out for hours on end in pubs that Black
people frequented,striking up conversations over friendly games of pool. After a
few months I realized that most of my reading as well as my friendship with
a Londoner combined to make the capital seem like the natural choice for my
field site. Indeed, I suspect that since Americans generally equate England with
London,I probably would not have been asked,“Why London?”if I had chosen
to do fieldwork there.