East, Saffron Anant Madhav; (2024) Antiracism in Southall, c.1968 – c.1982. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This dissertation analyses antiracist activism in Southall in the period c.1964 to c.1984 in order to shed light on the ways that gender, generation and political Blackness shaped the activism of the case study organisations and movements: the Black People’s Alliance (BPA), Indian Workers’ Associations (IWAs), Southall Black Sisters (SBS) and Asian Youth Movements (AYMs). The thesis explores how, when and on what terms South Asian-majority activist organisations engaged with political Blackness in Southall and across Britain. Broadly, here, ‘Black’ politics refer to activism that sits at the intersections of antiracism and socialism, based on lived experiences of racism in Britain as well as class and gender. The thesis tells a new story about the relationship between these multiple modes of identity and South Asian antiracism in Britain. This research thus adds to the increasing historiographical emphasis on Black politics and Black Power in Modern Britain, adding nuance to our understanding of ‘Black’ as a political category through a specific focus on South Asian engagement with Black political theories and practice. Current research is weighted more towards African Caribbean or other African diasporic contributions to Black politics in Britain, and often historicises male-dominated activism as normative. This dissertation seeks to recentre gender, both masculinities and the female experience, in analysis of Black activism in South Asian-majority organisations. It focuses on the historical, local and generational contingencies of this Blackness. More broadly, the thesis develops our understanding of social movements in 1970s Britain, and in their broader translocal intellectual contexts, exploring the relationships between theory, identities and activist practice. I argue that political Blackness has played a major role in shaping South Asian Black politics in gendered and generationally divergent ways, and that political education has been at the centre of South Asian antiracism. Crucially, the key methodological contribution of the thesis is that it centres the voices and agency of the activists whose lives are explored by using sources created by them. I use a combination of Oral History interviews and archival research, using the records of the BPA, IWAs, SBS and AYMs, to illuminate how activists saw and framed themselves and their activism, and what implications this had in practice.

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