Barbara Korte, Eva Ulrike Pirker Black History – White History ...

From:
Barbara Korte, Eva Ulrike Pirker
Black History – White History
Britain’s Historical Programme between Windrush
and Wilberforce
November 2011, 288 p., 33,80 €, ISBN 978-3-8376-1935-5
Britain’s recent historical culture is marked by a shift. As a consequence of new political
directives, black history began to be mainstreamed into the realm of national history
from the late 1990s onwards. »Black History – White History« assesses a number of
manifestations of this new cultural historiography on screen and on stage, in museums
and other accessible sites, emerging in the context of two commemorative events:
the Windrush anniversary and the 1807 abolition bicentenary. It inquires into the
terms on which the new historical programme could take hold, its sustainability and
its representational politics.
Barbara Korte is professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg, Germany.
Eva Ulrike Pirker is lecturer in English Literary and Cultural Studies at the University
of Freiburg, Germany.
For further information:
www.transcript-verlag.de/ts1935/ts1935.php
© 2011 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

Contents
Acknowledgments | 7
Note on Citations | 9
Introduction | 11
PART I: BETWEEN PUBLIC AND POPULAR:
APPROACHING A BLACK BRITISH HISTORY
1. Discovering a Past for the Present | 17
2. Historical Culture and Social Communication | 37
3. Popular Re/Presentation of History and Its Media | 47
4. Key Aims and Questions | 53
PART II: THE BICENTENARY EFFECT: HOW THE SLAVE
TRADE, SLAVERY AND ABOLITION WENT PUBLIC
1. Remembering and Forgetting Slavery | 57
2. Screening Slavery and the Slave Trade
before the Bicentenary | 65
3. Simon Schama’s Rough Crossings:
From Popular History Book to Television History | 81
4. The Abolition as Costume Film:
Amazing Grace – Black History with a White Hero | 99
5. Setting a Critical Tone:
In Search of William Wilberforce | 115

6. ›Doing an Anniversary‹:
The Event Culture Surrounding 2007 | 121
7. The Impact of 2007 –
Slavery and the Slave Trade in British Museums | 135
8. Family Matters:
Genealogy as Popular (Black) History | 163
PART III: KEEPING POST-WAR MIGRATION VISIBLE:
THE WINDRUSH STORY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST
CENTURY
1. Screening and Staging an Arrival | 183
2. Family, Sport and Period in Wondrous Oblivion | 185
3. Notting Hill in a Historical Crime Serial | 199
4. Migration as Heritage Drama? Small Island | 207
5. Migration History as Entertainment?
Trends in Contemporary British Theatre | 231
6. The Windrush Story as Musical | 239
Conclusion | 251
Bibliography | 255
Index | 279

Introduction
History is a contested field whose images and narratives emerge to a considerable
extent from discursive processes. In Western societies today we
can observe a pronounced need for and an increased »consumption« of
history (cf. De Groot 2009). As a consequence of this demand, histories are
increasingly being produced and made available in ways that – rather than
speaking to specialists or special interest groups – are accessible to wider
audiences. 1 The general audience’s interest, it seems, can be taken for
granted and is served on the cultural market. Like other countries, the
United Kingdom has been experiencing a conspicuous peak of historical
interest since the end of the twentieth century, as David Cannadine remarks:
»In Britain, the late 1990s and early 2000s witnessed what was widely regarded as
an unprecedented interest in history; among publishers, in the newspapers, on radio
and on film, and (especially) on television; and from the general public who, it
seemed, could not get enough of it. Translated into the market-orientated language
of our day, it looked as though more history was being produced and consumed than
ever before.« (Cannadine 2004: 1)
Reasons for this history boom suggested by Cannadine include, among
others, »unprecedented outbursts of national retrospection« (for instance on
the occasion of the Queen Mother’s death in 2002) or the sheer availability
1 Of course, such audiences display, in themselves, a high heterogeneity in terms
of class, age, gender and ethnicity. It is a cross-section of such audiences that
products aimed at a ›general‹ or ›mainstream‹ audience usually try to reach.

12 | BLACK HISTORY – WHITE HISTORY
of historical information through the revolution in information technology.
In addition, history has become a major entertainment source, not only on
television but also in literature or in themed environments and special
events. The possible motives for the contemporary historical interest are
plenty and difficult to concretise, but they can be seen as an indicator of an
intensified need for orientation. Definitions and explanations of belonging
and identity are sought in a world that has become more complex in a short
period of time due to rapid changes. The »patterns of understanding« we
construct for the past can help us to »explain the origins and nature of the
world in which we live. And doing this, we define and redefine the place
that we occupy in that world.« (Morris-Suzuki 2005: 2f.) What must engage
us when we consider history, therefore, are not only its many forms,
but also the diverse functions which history fulfils in various societies. The
term ›historical culture‹ is increasingly used for the ways in which societies
make certain segments of the past significant and useful for their present
concerns and interpretative needs. »Cultures of history«, according to Billie
Melman (2006: 11), are »cultures at work«; they make »versions of history
meaningful and workable for individuals within the constrictions of society,
the economy, and the state«, and they do so »both in a social and material
world and in their imaginary« (Melman 2006: 4). Historical cultures today
draw from a wide range of media and forms, notably those with a mainstream
or even ›popular‹ appeal. 2
The particular interest of this book is the ways in which a black history
has been made accessible and relevant to a wider audience in the
United Kingdom in recent years. This history – like black British culture in
general – has become the subject of intensified academic activity. 3 How-
2 The popularisation of historical knowledge is an expanding but diffuse field of
research. Cf. the surveys provided by Korte/Paletschek (2009a; 2011) and Berger/Lorenz/Melman
(2011). The term ›popular‹ is a contested term and this
book cannot review the debates surrounding it in depth. It should be noted,
however, that no cultural product is inherently popular; its popularity depends
on cultural contexts and processes that make a product popular.
3 Cf., for instance, the pioneering studies of Walvin (1971; 1973) and Shyllon
(1974; 1977), later continued, among others, by Edwards/Walvin (1983), Fryer
(1984), Dabydeen (1985), Dabydeen/Wilson-Tagoe (1987) and, again, Walvin
(1984; 1986). An important impetus for further research was provided by the

INTRODUCTION | 13
ever, treatments of this history which address a non-specialist audience
have a particular capacity to disseminate knowledge about the longstanding
presence of black people in the national past and anchor it in the
national historical consciousness. This is seminal in a society which has
begun to identify itself as a multiethnic society. However, in many of the
recent ›popular‹ representations, black history still emerges as contested,
and the choices of whether, and how, to address its complexities vary considerably.
To do justice to this variety, we approach our subject through a
number of case studies of presentations that come in different media and
genres and display different perspectives on black history. They all date
from the now already historical period during which a New Labour Government
promoted ›multiethnicity‹ and hence gave impetus to revisions of
the nation’s historical culture.
Part I provides essential background information and the basic premises
of the present study: a survey of the promotion of black history in the
British public and its establishment as an essential component of a new
historical culture for a ›multiethnic Britain‹, as well as our main conceptual
framework and terminology. The case studies in Parts II (on the British
slave trade and its abolition) and III (on post-Second World War migration
from the Caribbean) constitute the core of this book. They concentrate on
those two segments of black British history which have received the biggest
share of public attention over the past years. Both were articulated on the
occasion of prominent anniversaries in 1998 and 2007 respectively: the
fiftieth anniversary of the arrival of the Empire Windrush from the Carib-
1981 International Conference on the History of Blacks in Britain, which was
accompanied by a special issue of History Today (The History of Blacks in
Britain 1981). Race relations have been a dominant theme in research from the
1990s onward (cf. Goulbourne 1998; Miles 1993). Another area that was
investigated in more depth was the black presence in Britain during the slave
trade and the colonial past (cf. Morgan/Hawkins 2004; Myers 1996; Okonon
1998 and Walvin 1992; 1998; 2006; 2007). Yet the field still remained
fragmented until the publication of The Oxford Companion to Black British
History (Dabydeen/Gilmore/Jones 2007), the first encyclopaedia comprising information
about historical figures, key terms and movements. For an assessment
of the emergence of narrative (factual and fictional) discourses surrounding a
black British history cf. Pirker (2011a).

14 | BLACK HISTORY – WHITE HISTORY
bean, and the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade. 4 That anniversaries
can function as triggers for the inclusion of new themes in a nation’s
historical culture brings up questions with regard to the sort of history that
is represented or performed for a wider audience: Which anniversaries are
taken up in the first place, when, where and why? Who are the agents that
bring about, take part in and consume historical celebrations? Which
anniversaries (or commemorative events more generally) compete with or
dominate over others and why? These as well as other related questions are
considered in several chapters of this book, which otherwise provide close
critical readings of the cases investigated. Taken together, the analyses in
Parts II and III give insights into what is a highly diverse and contested
historical culture, regardless of the fact that in all cases a ›general‹ audience
was the intended addressee. The comparison of the popularisation of the
Windrush story with the recent narratives around slavery and abolition also
raises the question as to what kind of black history it is that ›suits‹ the
recent historical culture of Britain best.
4 For research into the significance of anniversaries and celebrations in historical
culture cf., among others, Johnston (1991), the survey by Macho (1998), the
studies by Chase (1990) and Botstein (1997) and the contributions by Ben-
Aaron, Katriel and Sarangi to a themed issue of the journal Text (September
2005).