Mixed Race Studies

Before the Windrush: Race Relations in 20th-Century Liverpool

Liverpool University Press
March 2014
288 pages
16 black and white illustrations, 1 colour illustrations, 1 maps
234 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781846319679
Paperback ISBN: 9781781380000

John Belchem, Emeritus Professor of History
University of Liverpool

Long before the arrival of the ‘Empire Windrush’ after the Second World War, Liverpool was widely known for its polyglot population, its boisterous ‘sailortown’ and cosmopolitan profile of transients, sojourners and settlers. Regarding Britain as the mother country, ‘coloured’ colonials arrived in Liverpool for what they thought to be internal migration into a common British world. What they encountered, however, was very different. Their legal status as British subjects notwithstanding, ‘coloured’ colonials in Liverpool were the first to discover: ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’.

Despite the absence of significant new immigration, despite the high levels of mixed dating, marriages and parentage, and despite pioneer initiatives in race and community relations, black Liverpudlians encountered racial discrimination, were left marginalized and disadvantaged and, in the aftermath of the Toxteth riots of 1981, the once proud ‘cosmopolitan’ Liverpool stood condemned for its ‘uniquely horrific’ racism.

‘Before the Windrush’ is a fascinating study that enriches our understanding of how the empire ‘came home’. By drawing attention to Liverpool’s mixed population in the first half of the twentieth century and its approach to race relations, this book seeks to provide historical context and perspective to debates about Britain’s experience of empire in the twentieth century.

Contents

• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction: ‘The most disturbing case of racial disadvantage in the United Kingdom’
• 1. Edwardian cosmopolitanism
• 2. Riot, miscegenation and inter-war depression
• 3. War-time hospitality and the colour bar
• 4. Repatriation, reconstruction and post-war race relations
• 5. Race relations in the 1950s
• 6. 1960s: race and youth
• 7. The failure of community relations
• 8. ‘It took a riot’
• Sources consulted
• Index

Legal Fictions: Constituting Race, Composing Literature

Duke University Press
January 2014
176 pages
3 photographs
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-5595-3
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-5581-6

Karla FC Holloway, James B. Duke Professor of English; Professor of Law; Professor of Women’s Studies
Duke University

In Legal Fictions, Karla FC Holloway both argues that U.S. racial identity is the creation of U.S. law and demonstrates how black authors of literary fiction have engaged with the law’s constructions of race since the era of slavery. Exploring the resonance between U.S. literature and U.S. jurisprudence, Holloway reveals Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage as stories about personhood and property, David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as structured by evidence law, and Nella Larsen’s Passing as intimately related to contract law. Holloway engages the intentional, contradictory, and capricious constructions of race embedded in the law with the same energy that she brings to her masterful interpretations of fiction by U.S. writers. Her readings shed new light on the many ways that black U.S. authors have reframed fundamental questions about racial identity, personhood, and the law from the nineteenth into the twenty-first centuries. Legal Fictions is a bold declaration that the black body is thoroughly bound by law and an unflinching look at the implications of that claim.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Introduction: Bound by Law
  • Intimate Intersectionalities—Scalar Reflections
  • Public Fictions, Private Facts
  • Simile as Precedent
  • Property, Contract, and Evidentiary Values
• 1. The Claims of Property: On Being and Belonging
  • The Capital in Question
  • Imagined Liberalism
  • Mapping Racial Reason
  • Being in Place: Landscape, Never Inscape
• 2. Bodies as Evidence (of Things Not Seen)
  • Secondhand Tales and Hearsay
  • Black Legibility—Can I Get a Witness?
  • Trying to Read Me
• 3. Composing Contract
  • “A novel-like tenor”
  • Passing and Protection
  • A Secluded Colored Neighborhood
• Epilogue. When and Where “All the Dark-Glass Boys” Enter
• A Contagion of Madness
• Notes
• References
• Acknowledgments
• Index