Black Handsworth: Race in 1980s Britain.

• Author: Ford, Amanda

Kieran Connell. Black Handsworth: Race in 1980s Britain. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. ix+220 pages. Softcover, $34.95.

At its height, the British Empire ruled over 412 million people. The country's navy stood alone as the premier fleet in the world. British industry and trade dominated world markets and Pax Britannica ensured peace among the nations of the world. This nostalgic image of the imperial zenith is not a wholly accurate one, but it is certainly compelling. The years following World War II were a painful period for the once great empire, as the twin forces of decline in the metropole and rising nationalism in the periphery forced Britain to release colony after colony. By the 1960s, an American statesman argued that, "Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role." In the vacuum left by the loss of empire many in the isles focused on the tradition offered by the British monarchy and the ineffable, quintessentially British--or perhaps more accurately--English character. These cold comforts offered a chance to sidestep the hard realities of decline and instead reframe the conversation around British identity. It is perhaps not surprising then that current Prime Minister Boris Johnson wrote in 2002 that, "The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge anymore." Imperial nostalgia has become a powerful force in domestic political ideologies, as evidenced in part by the Brexit vote in 2016.

All too frequently this discourse centers the anxieties and concern of white Britons, but historian Kieran Connell's Black Handsworth: Race in 1980s Britain provides a useful corrective to this whitewashed narrative. Connell's work examines Handsworth, a racially diverse suburb of Birmingham, and the specific ways in which its black population constructed a new identity by patch-working global discourses about racial justice and diasporic culture. Margaret Thatcher's imperial turn obscured the realities of post-colonial life in Britain, specifically in regard to race and power. As the British navy attempted to restore some semblance of imperial power in the Falklands, fears about racially diverse urban spaces reached new heights. Connell is careful to situate these 1980s moments in their proper larger historical context; certainly, racial anxieties were not new in the decade, but their expression was specific to this particular moment. Black Handsworth is divided into thematic...