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The Fugitive Underground of British Blackness: Insights from London's 'Riotous' Geographies.
- Source :
-
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies . 2023, Vol. 22 Issue 5, p1320-1341. 22p. - Publication Year :
- 2023
-
Abstract
- This paper historicizes the riotous geographies of British Blackness by focusing on three socalled "riots" in London's post-World War II development, the 1958 Notting Hill uprisings, the 1981 Brixton uprisings and the 2011 pan-London uprisings. Mobilizing debates in Black (British) Geographies, I challenge state narrations of these events as illegitimate expressions of Black Britons' political discontent. Based on archival research, I expose such framings as ongoing attempts of whiteness to render Black British geographies "ungeographic" within a supposed white British geography. Employing fugitivity as method, I show how these riotous events constituted possibilities for escaping racialized spatio-political categories of British state geographies. I consider British Blackness as political category and as a historically contingent discursive construction that mobilizes people from the African diaspora in specific ways but also stretches beyond them. Thus, I ask: How does Blackness continue to escape attempts of capturing it in and through British state geographies and in what ways does this escape constitute a transfiguration of Black British (un)geographies? The three historical cases I examine exemplify the struggles between the state's efforts to enclose and exclude Black Britons and their efforts to forge an underground of British Blackness in the wake of Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 14929732
- Volume :
- 22
- Issue :
- 5
- Database :
- Academic Search Index
- Journal :
- ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 174726935
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.7202/1107311ar