This classic book is a powerful indictment of contemporary attitudes to race. By accusing British intellectuals and politicians on both sides of the political divide of refusing to take race seriously, Paul Gilroy caused immediate uproar when this book was first published in 1987. A brilliant and explosive exploration of racial discourses, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack provided a powerful new direction for race relations in Britain.

In Thinking Black, Rob Waters reveals black radical Britain’s wide cultural-political formation, tracing it across new institutions of black civil society and connecting it to decolonization and black liberation across the Atlantic world. He shows how, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, black radicalism defined what it meant to be black and what it meant to be radical in Britain.

The black experience varied greatly across space and over time. This book explores the lives of people of sub-Saharan Africa and their descendants, how they were shaped by empire, and how they in turn influenced the empire in everything from material goods to cultural style.

Seamen from the Caribbean and directly from Africa have contributed to both the British Royal Navy and Merchant Marine from at least the Tudor period. In this fascinating work, Dr. Ray Costello examines the work and experience of seamen of African descent in Britain's navy, from impressed slaves to free Africans, British West Indians, and British-born Black sailors.

Written in 1857, this is the autobiography of a Jamaican woman whose fame rivalled Florence Nightingale's during the Crimean War. Seacole's offer to volunteer as a nurse in the war met with racism and refusal. Undaunted, Seacole set out independently to the Crimea where she acted as doctor and 'mother' to wounded soldiers.

Prisons house hugely disproportionate numbers of people of colour, betraying the racism embedded in the system, while studies show that increasing prison sentences has no effect on crime.

This is an unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world. A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial and black consciousness movements around the word, the work is hailed for its scientific analysis and poetic grace when it was first published in 1952, the book remains a vital force today from one of the most important theorists of revolutionary struggle, colonialism, and racial difference in history.

Tracing the history of the Black dandy from eighteenth-century England to contemporary celebrity incarnations such as Andre 3000 and Sean Combs, This work explains how black people became arbiters of style and how they have historically used the dandy's signature tools - clothing, gesture, and wit - to break down limiting identity markers and propose new, fluid ways of fashioning political and social possibility in the black Atlantic world.

Explores the notable roles that contemporary British artists of African descent have played through four key case studies— Magdalene Odundo, Veronica Ryan, Mary Evans, and Maria Amidu—Monique Kerman. The author elucidates each of the artists’ creative response to their unique experience and examines how their work engages with issues of history, identity, diaspora, and the distillation of diverse cultural sources.

The development of British Black Art is tied up with a social and cultural history of Europe. British Black Art suggests new narratives about canonical artworks of the British Black Art movement, such as Lubaina Himid's 1984 "Freedom and Change," Eddie Chambers' 1980 "Destruction of the National Front" and Sonia Boyce's 1986 "Lay Back Keep Quiet and Think of What Made Britain So Great," interrogating their critical agency from an art-historical perspective.

Black female iconography has had a long and tortured history in public culture. The telling of this history has long occupied the work of black female theorists. Scandalize My Name builds upon the rich tradition of this work while approaching the study of black female representation as an opening onto a critical contemplation of the vagaries of black social life.

Black is Beautiful! The words were the exuberant rallying cry of a generation of black women who threw away their straightening combs and adopted a proud new style they called the Afro. Although the new beauty standards seemed to arise overnight, they actually had deep roots within black communities. Drawing on a diverse range of sources, Ain't I a Beauty Queen? will fascinate those interested in beauty culture, gender, class, and the dynamics of race and social movements.

Tracing the intertwined histories of the abolitionist and women's suffrage movements, Davis examines the racism and class prejudice inherent in so much of white feminism, and in doing so brings to light new pioneering heroines, from field slaves to mill workers, who fought back and refused to accept the lives into which they were born.

Examining both the white and the Black women's movement through a source base that includes original oral histories and extensive research using feminist periodicals, this book seeks to unpack the historical roots of long-running tensions between Black and white feminists.