‘Race’ and Resistance to Policing Before the ‘Windrush Years’: The Colonial Defence Committee and the Liverpool ‘Race Riots’ of 1948

Author(s):  
Christopher Fevre

Abstract Between 31 July and 2 August 1948, Liverpool experienced three nights of racial violence on a scale not witnessed since the end of the First World War. Despite being initiated by white rioters, the so-called ‘race riots’ of 1948 were more significant in terms of the relationship between the police and Liverpool’s black population. Previous studies have sought to understand why and what happened during the riots; however, there has been little analysis of the aftermath. This article looks specifically at how black people responded to the ‘race riots’ in 1948 and argues that this episode led to a period of heightened political activity at a local and national level centred around the issue of policing. It focusses on the Colonial Defence Committee (CDC) that was formed immediately after the riots to organize the legal defence of individuals believed to have been wrongfully arrested. In its structure and organizational methods, the CDC represented a prototype of the defence committees that became a hallmark of black political opposition to policing during the 1970s and 1980s. Examining the aftermath of the Liverpool ‘race riots’ in 1948, thus, offers new perspectives on the historical development of black political resistance to policing in twentieth-century Britain. On the one hand, it reveals a longer history of struggle against racially discriminatory policing, which predates the ‘Windrush years’ migration of the 1950s and early 1960s. It also highlights the historical continuities in the way that black resistance to policing manifested itself over the twentieth century.

Author(s):  
Moritz Ege ◽  
Andrew Wright Hurley

In this first essay, we delve into significant moments in the history (and pre-history) of twentieth century Afro-Americanophilia in Germany. We establish a periodisation stretching from the nineteenth century until the mid-1960s (from which point our second essay will continue), and take in the pre-colonial, the colonial, the Weimar, the Nazi; and the post-war eras.  We draw out some of the particularly significant moments, ruptures, and continuities within that time frame. We also identify some of the salient ways scholars have interpreted ‘Afro-Americanophilia’ during the period.  Focusing on a variety of practices of appropriation, communicative media, actors and forms of agency, power differentials, and sociocultural contexts, we discuss positive images of and affirmative approaches to black people in German culture and in its imaginaries. We attend to who was active in Afro-Americanophilia, in what ways, and what the effects of that agency were. Our main focus is on white German Afro-Americanophiles, but—without attempting to write a history of African Americans, black people in Germany, or Black Germans— we also inquire into the ways that the latter reacted to, suffered under the expectations levied upon them, or were able to engage with the demand for ‘black cultural traffic.’  


AJS Review ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-37
Author(s):  
Robert Chazan

The impact of Salo Wittmayer Baron on the study of the history of the Jews during the Middle Ages has been enormous. This impact has, in part, been generated by Baron's voluminous writings, in particular his threevolume The Jewish Community and–even more so–his eighteen-volume Social and Religious History of the Jews. Equally decisive has been Baron's influence through his students and his students' students. Almost all researchers here in North America currently engaged in studying aspects of medieval Jewish history can surely trace their intellectual roots back to Salo Wittmayer Baron. In a real sense, many of Baron's views have become widey assumed starting points for the field, ideas which need not be proven or irgued but are simply accepted as givens. Over the next decade or decades, hese views will be carefully identified and reevaluated. At some point, a major study of Baron's legacy, including his influence on the study of medieval Jewish history, will of necessity eventuate. Such a study will have, on the one hand, its inherent intellectual fascination; at the same time, it will constitute an essential element in the next stages of the growth of the field, as it inevitably begins to make its way beyond Baron and his twentieth-century ambience.


Author(s):  
Ransford Edward Van Gyampo ◽  
Nana Akua Anyidoho

The youth in Africa have been an important political force and performed a wide range of roles in the political field as voters, activists, party members, members of parliament, ministers, party “foot soldiers,” and apparatchiks. Although political parties, governments, and other political leaders often exploit young people’s political activity, their participation in both local and national level politics has been significant. In the academic literature and policy documents, youth are portrayed, on the one hand, as “the hope for the future” and, on the other, as a disadvantaged and vulnerable group. However, the spread of social media has created an alternative political space for young people. Active participation of young people in politics through social media channels suggests that they do not lack interest in politics, but that the political systems in Africa marginalize and exclude them from political dialogue, participation, decision-making, and policy implementation. The solution to the problem of the exclusion of young people from mainstream politics would involve encouraging their participation in constitutional politics and their greater interest and involvement in alternative sites, goals, and forms of youth political activism in contemporary Africa.


Author(s):  
Brent M. S. Campney

This chapter chronicles the long “Red Summer” and persistent racial violence throughout the 1920s. With America's entry into World War I, black populations swelled in response to labor shortages, thus precipitating racial conflict over jobs and housing between white residents of northern industrial cities and the black newcomers. These tensions would culminate in the “Red Summer,” a season of race riots, conflagrations, and other types of spectacular violence. Though the wartime surge in violence would subside after 1921, racial prejudice and violence continued on. Despite these setbacks, however, black resistance likewise persisted; and this period marks the ascent of a new generation of civil rights activists, as well as a few other notable milestones such as the Thurman-Watts v. Board of Education of Coffeyville and Brown v. Board of Education decisions and the establishment of the Kansas City branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).


1979 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Godfrey

Historians of Chartism face a dilemma. On the one hand, they are obliged to interpret this national political movement on the national level, to attempt to explain why millions of British working men and women were engaged in organized political activity over several decades. But, on the other hand, many of the richest sources on Chartism are found on the local level. Older histories of the movement treated Chartism from a national perspective, but failed to take note of many of its complexities. More recently, a good deal of local research has rigorously tested our assumptions about Chartism, but the task of carefully analyzing the movement on the national level still remains.


1993 ◽  
Vol 56 (10) ◽  
pp. 360-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Jackson

Historically, there have been strong links between the establishment and maintenance of health through occupation, on the one hand, and broad sociopolitical and economic forces, on the other. As a result, occupational therapists have consistently contributed to, and been influenced by, prevalent attitudes to work, leisure, unemployment and poverty. This article examines the nature of these Interactions between occupational therapy and society, by exploring some of the continuities and discontinuities in the practice of occupational therapy within the history of a particular institution established in 1902 for children and adults with what are now referred to as ‘learning difficulties’ or ‘learning disabilities’. The article argues that it is the strength of the ideological and pragmatic links between therapy, health and work, rather than a reliance on rigid biomedical explanations of disease, that has traditionally constituted the basis for the professional expertise of occupational therapists.


2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 24 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Kornhaber

This article traces a genealogy of performance philosophy along two separate lines within the history of the twentieth-century academy.  On the one hand, it locates within the long history of philosophically-informed studies of dramatic literature a partial model for the work of performance philosophy, one that applied philosophical scrutiny to dramatic texts without ever extending the same consideration to theatrical performance—in spite of the practical theatrical work of many of this movement’s leading academic proponents.  On the other hand, it identifies in the poststructualist rethinking of textual authority an opening for the reconsideration of philosophical communication that returns performance to a place of philosophical potential that it has not securely held since before Plato’s dialogues.  It is argued that the intersection of these two trend lines in academic thought should be regarded as constituting an important intellectual genesis point for the emergence of performance philosophy and a useful means of approaching the purposes and boundary points of the field.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Campbell Orchard

<p>Revitalised by Mussolini in the early twentieth century as a symbol of the ‘New Roman Empire’, Roma has endured a long history of national representation. Traditionally the figure of Roma is on the one side associated by historians with the Roman imperial cult and Augustus, and on the other by Numismatists as the helmeted female figure on the coinage of the Roman Republic. However, these figures are not presently considered one and the same. When describing this figure, Roma is considered a Greek innovation travelling west, which naturally discounts well over two centuries of Roman issued coinage. Roma inaugurated by Hadrian and previously manipulated by Augustus was not simply a Greek import, but a complex Roman idea, which, true to Roman form, incorporated native and foreign elements in shaping an outward looking signifier of Roman identity.</p>


1974 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-90
Author(s):  
Kaj Thaning

Grundtvig and MarxEjvind Larsen: Grundtvig - og noget om Marx. Studenterkredsen, ÅrhusReviewed by Kaj ThaningEjvind Larsen has put a considerable amount of work into his book. It is obvious that he not only knows his Grundtvig and his Marx, but he has also studied the sociology of Grundtvigianism and is thoroughly conversant with the research work on Grundtvig. But above all, what he writes is based on strong personal commitment, which leads to criticism of both Grundtvig and Marx, but at the same time to a synthesis of both, since, to Ejvind Larsen, between them they indicate solutions to the social problems of today.The starting-point for both of them is a clash with German idealism on the one hand and the materialistic conception of man on the other. To Grundtvig man is a »Divine Experiment« of dust and spirit, to Marx man is the creator of history, while he is also a product of history, of production. Ejvind Larsen asserts emphatically that Marx is no economic determinist. The two great rebels can also be compared in that they oppose the dissociation of manual and spiritual work and are against all elites, hierarchies and bureaucracies. The people must be liberated from all this, but they must liberate themselves.Ejvind Larsen stresses, however, the influence that Grundtvig had on the emancipation of the Danish peasants and in connection with this gives the quotation, »Åndens løsen er bedrifter« (The watchword of the Spirit is deeds). It is in the significance of the spirit and in Grundtvig’s emphasis on dialogue as a basis for any emancipation of the people that he finds the explanation of the fact that the Danish peasantry was made free »despite the economic conditions« and »even though the prevailing tendencies should have reduced it to a powerless pettybourgeoisie and reactionary proletariat.«Ejvind Larsen emphasizes Grundtvig’s dissociation of his work in the Church and his work for the people, and is himself opposed to any mingling of religious and political activity. He rejoices in the fact that Grundtvig does not talk of »original sin« in a historical and political context, as opposed to the Church, which makes use of this concept to stop political progress. But he has not noticed that Grundtvig has, in a sense, secularized original sin, and as a mythologian and a historian talks of the »great calamity«, which »very early on« befell man, making his existence one of conflict and predicament. In Ejvind Larsen’s book there is a discrepancy, in that his reduction of the obvious conflicts of existence to historical calamities (in the plural), which can and should be overcome by mankind (as opposed to the sin that faith alone reveals in man and which can only be overcome through the grace of God), is at variance with his constant emphasis on the »principle of contradiction« and on the fight for man being considered a living person placed between absolute contradictions. Ejvind Larsen will, however, undoubtedly continue his work - and will deal with this inner contradiction in his book, which, despite its lack of clarity on various other points, is an inspiring achievement.


Author(s):  
Daniil Yu. Dorofeev ◽  
◽  
Vladislava N. Semenova ◽  

The article is devoted to anthropological problems of the human image in the history of culture and philosophy of the twentieth century and in processes of visualization of political communication in the postmodern era. In the first part of the article, it is proposed to consider the transition from the modern era to the postmodern era in the context of the main stages in the history of the relationship between word and image, language and visuality in European culture of the XX century. The understanding of the visual image as defined by discursive practitioners and understood as a text in the semiotic paradigm of the mid-twentieth century, primarily in the works of R. Barth, is analyzed in detail. The liberation of the visual image from language discourse, which begins at the end of the last century, leads to the active development of visual anthropology, and radical changes in the reproduction technology to a change in the ways of perceiving the world. The article examines the features of the functioning of human images existing in the public space, problems of perception and modern visual communication. The second part of the article examines the tendencies of the development of political ideologies in the postmodern era. The authors describe three coordinates of system of postmodern political ideologies: the disappearance of traditional political ideologies, the revolution of technology, the political changes of the 1980s and formation of “monotonous politics”. It is shown that in the postmodern era political ideologies are forced to minimize the theoretical justification of their fundamental principles, turning instead to new visual and virtual forms of promoting their ideas. The main tendencies are change of the form of political practices, rejection of traditional methods of formulating political ideas, visualization and virtualization of the theoretical and practical components of political activity. The specific features of theatricalization of political and art activism are revealed in the article. In addition, the main aspects of modern political communication are highlighted: functionality, superficiality, and network character.


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