scholarly journals Baptised by fire: an interview with Suresh Grover

Race & Class ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 88-101
Author(s):  
Jasbinder S. Nijjar

In this contribution to narrating the black British history of struggle, one of the leading lights of community-based anti-racism, who has worked over four decades from Southall, west of London and one of the first post-war settlements of ‘New Commonwealth’ Asian workers, is interviewed. He records some of the milestone struggles of The Monitoring Group from the street campaigning against lethal racist violence in the 1970s to the nationally important watershed government-commissioned report by Macpherson acknowledging institutional racism in 1999. Suresh Grover explains the impetus for organising, and the ways of building an anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-patriarchal movement around and beyond family campaigns against state injustices – changing over time to meet new circumstances.

1996 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Max Ahmadu Sesay

The brutal civil war that engulfed Liberia, following Charles Taylor's invasion in December 1989, has left an indelible mark in the history of this West African state. The six-year old struggle led to the collapse of what was already an embattled economy; to the almost complete destruction of physical infrastructure built over a century and half of enterprise and oligarchic rule; to the killing, maiming, and displacement of more than 50 per cent of the country's estimated pre-war population of 2·5 million; and to an unprecedented regional initiative to help resolve the crisis. Five years after the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) intervened with a Cease-fire Monitoring Group (Ecomog), an agreement that was quickly hailed as the best chance for peace in Liberia was signed in August 1995 in the Nigeriancapital, Abuja.


Author(s):  
Gavin Schaffer

This chapter interrogates the relationship between television comedy, power and racial politics in post-war Britain. In a period where Black and Asian Britons were forced to negotiate racism as a day-to-day reality, the essay questions the role played by television comedy in reflecting and shaping British multicultural society. Specifically, this chapter probes Black and Asian agency in comedy production, questioning who the joke makers were and what impact this had on the development of comedy and its reception. The work of scholars of Black and Asian comedy television such as Sarita Malik, and of Black stand-up comedy such as Stephen Small, has helped us to understand that Black- and Asian-led British comedy emerged belatedly in the 1980s and 1990s, hindered by the historical underrepresentation of these communities in British cultural production and the disinclination of British cultural leaders to address this problem. This chapter uses these scholarly frames of reference, alongside research that addresses the social and political functions of comedy, to re-open the social history of Black British communities in post-war Britain through the story of sitcom.


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl Milofsky

AbstractThis article argues the position that the symbolic sense of community is a product of action by associations and larger community-based organizations. It draws on a theory from urban sociology called “the community of limited liability.” In the past this theory, first articulated by Morris Janowitz, has mostly been used to argue that residents living in a local neighborhood feel a sense of identification with that area to the extent that the symbolism of that neighborhood has been developed. This article extends Janowitz’s theory to apply to local associations and their efforts to create activities, movements, and products that encourage residents to expand their sense of symbolic attachment to a place. We argue that this organizational method has long been used by local associations but it has not been recognized as an organizational theory. Because associations have used this approach over time, communities have a historical legacy of organizing and symbol creating efforts by many local associations. Over time they have competed, collaborated, and together developed a collective vision of place. They also have created a local interorganizational field and this field of interacting associations and organizations is dense with what we call associational social capital. Not all communities have this history of associational activity and associational social capital. Where it does exist, the field becomes an institutionalized feature of the community. This is what we mean by an institutional theory of community.


Urban History ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Tomlinson

AbstractThis article argues for a central role for the concept of de-industrialization in understanding the evolution of the economies of urban Britain in the years since 1945. Above all, it is suggested, this concept is crucial because it focuses attention on the consequences of the transition from an industrial to a service-dominated labour market. To make this argument requires a careful definition of the term, along with recognition of its potential weaknesses as well as strengths. Key issues are highlighted by drawing on three diverse urban areas, which help to show the ubiquity of the process, but also its diverse patterns, chronologies and impacts. These examples are a stereotypical ‘post-industrial city’ (Dundee); a major city where de-industrialization has played an under-regarded role in developments (London); and a medium-size town in the south of England (High Wycombe), where the decline of a core industry (furniture) was crucial to its recent history. The final sections analyse the relationship between de-industrialization and other key frameworks commonly deployed to shape understanding of the recent history of Britain: ‘decline’, ‘globalization’ and ‘the triumph of neo-liberalism’.


1998 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 239-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Cox

This article traces the history of Musical Education of the Under-Twelves (MEUT) from its birth in 1949 to its demise in 1983. Because it arose from a coalition of pre-war societies and associations it provides a valuable historical link, as well as an example of a later alliance with progressive ideas in education. The paper considers the following questions: What were the historical roots of MEUT? Why was MEUT formed? What new ideas were developed and debated, and how did these relate to traditional concerns? What accounted for the demise of MEUT? Through the investigation of such an association we can better understand how music as a curriculum subject changes over time.


Author(s):  
Alan Rice

This article discusses the Scarborough-born Black British artist Jade Montserrat, interrogating her multimedia work in the light of the history of slavery and Black British presence, postcolonialism, and ecocriticism. It looks specifically at the video works Clay and Peat Bog, discussing them in the context of their relation to Black presence in the North and the history of Black agency including new information about runaway slaves. The watercolour Toes and the installation piece No Need for Clothing are discussed in these terms as well, while the latter is used also to describe how charcoal traces from the work illuminate the physical cost of the work on Black bodies. The article uses theoretical work by Edouard Glissant, Paul Ricoeur, Michael Rothberg, Katherine McKitterick, Ian Baucom, and Hannah Arendt, as well as the context of Black British history, to help illuminate the multiple meanings the work engenders.


Author(s):  
Janet Sorensen

While eighteenth-century efforts to standardize the English language have long been studied, less well-known are the era's popular collections of odd slang, criminal argots, provincial dialects, and nautical jargon. This book delves into how these published works presented the supposed lexicons of the “common people” and traces the ways that these languages, once shunned and associated with outsiders, became objects of fascination in printed glossaries, and in novels, poems, and songs. The book argues that the recognition and recovery of outsider languages was part of a transition in the eighteenth century from an aristocratic, exclusive body politic to a British national community based on the rhetoric of inclusion and liberty, as well as the revaluing of a common British past. These representations of the vernacular made room for the “common people” within national culture, but only after representing their language as “strange.” Such strange and estranged languages, even or especially in their obscurity, came to be claimed as British, making for complex imaginings of the nation and those who composed it. Odd cant languages, witty slang phrases, provincial terms newly valued for their connection to British history, or nautical jargon repurposed for sentimental connections all toggle, in eighteenth-century jest books, novels, and poems, between the alluringly alien and familiarly British. Shedding new light on the history of the English language, the book explores how eighteenth-century British literature transformed the patois attributed to those on the margins into living symbols of the nation.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 106-115
Author(s):  
Sindorela Doli Kryeziu

Abstract In our paper we will talk about the whole process of standardization of the Albanian language, where it has gone through a long historical route, for almost a century.When talking about standard Albanian language history and according to Albanian language literature, it is often thought that the Albanian language was standardized in the Albanian Language Orthography Congress, held in Tirana in 1972, or after the publication of the Orthographic Rules (which was a project at that time) of 1967 and the decisions of the Linguistic Conference, a conference of great importance that took place in Pristina, in 1968. All of these have influenced chronologically during a very difficult historical journey, until the standardization of the Albanian language.Considering a slightly wider and more complex view than what is often presented in Albanian language literature, we will try to describe the path (history) of the standard Albanian formation under the influence of many historical, political, social and cultural factors that are known in the history of the Albanian people. These factors have contributed to the formation of a common state, which would have, over time, a common standard language.It is fair to think that "all activity in the development of writing and the Albanian language, in the field of standardization and linguistic planning, should be seen as a single unit of Albanian culture, of course with frequent manifestations of specific polycentric organization, either because of divisions within the cultural body itself, or because of the external imposition"(Rexhep Ismajli," In Language and for Language ", Dukagjini, Peja, 1998, pp. 15-18.)


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