AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award Studentship:Future Pasts: British-Caribbean Popular Culture and the Politics of History, 1948-1998

The Institute of the Americas (University College London) and the British Library invite applications for the fully-funded AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award PhD studentship: Future Pasts: British-Caribbean Popular Culture and the Politics of History, 1948-1998.

This project explores the articulation of ‘reconstructed pasts and anticipated futures’ (Scott, 2004) by the British Caribbean community in post-World War II/post-Windrush Britain. Engaging with recent scholarship on the Black Atlantic, urban cultures, and ‘Black globality’, the project will analyse the cultural forms that evolved within the British Caribbean community in the last half of the twentieth century. What histories of the Caribbean were imagined, reconstructed, and commemorated by the British Caribbean community after WWII? What social critiques and visions did these historical narratives produce? How was cultural production linked to political activism? How did the Caribbean political present impact on the cultural and historical narratives produced in the context of the diaspora?

The Caribbean community in Britain has made substantive contributions to cultural production in the decades since WW2. Caribbean migrants were involved in the creation of important publishing houses (Bogle L’Ouverture, New Beacon Books); newspapers and journals (West Indian World, Race Today); cultural activist organisations (the Caribbean Artists Movement, the International Book Fairs of Radical Black and Third World Books); and made significant interventions across a range of cultural media, including radio, theatre, music, carnival and the performing arts. These initiatives – and the networks of intellectuals, journalists, writers, artists, photographers and community organisers mobilized around them – occupy a critical place in the history of diasporic cultural production and political activism in the period, yet they remain curiously under-studied. While recent scholarship has begun to address the gap, there is much scope to analyse the significance and range of contributions these enterprises made to the political and cultural life of Caribbean and Black British communities, and to British society more widely.

The project offers a unique opportunity to draw on significant but underused resources in the British Library collections. These resources include, for example, newspapers, periodicals and journals such as The Voice, South London Press, Race Today, Pan-Africa, Caribbean News, West Indian World, and West Indian Gazette; the publications of Bogle L’Ouverture Publishing, Hansib Publications and New Beacon Press; the papers of significant artists and writers (such as Andrew Salkey); and the Sound Archive, which includes interviews with migrants, carnival music and performances, and recordings and interviews from Black underground radio stations from the 1980s and 1990s. The project also offers the potential to work with new materials such as the interviews and poetry from the ongoing Black British Poetry CDP project.
The theme of the studentship is intentionally broad, to allow students to tailor their specialism to suit their interests and experiences. Candidates with demonstrable experience and interests in Black British and/or Caribbean history are particularly encouraged to apply.

The successful candidate will profit from the academic and practical resources of both partner institutions, becoming a full participant in the international community of research students at UCL while also having the opportunity to gain first-hand professional experience of curatorial work at the British Library, as well as exposure to and training in digital humanities. Furthermore, they could potentially work with curators to produce or acquire new materials for the British Library, such as interviews or archives of key artists and writers from the period under study. The student will participate in the Library’s rich programme of public events, study days and student seminars in order to disseminate research findings to academic and non-academic audiences.

The successful holder of the studentship will be supervised by Dr. Kate Quinn at the Institute of the Americas, UCL and Dr. Elizabeth Cooper at the British Library. As well as intellectual support from research communities at both supervising institutions, the student will have access to desk space in a shared office with other PGR students at the Institute of the Americas, and shared office space at the British Library. The student will also benefit from access to the extensive seminar and events programmes hosted by both institutions.