Caroline Bressey

Forgotten histories: three stories of black girls from Barnardo's Victorian archive.

Abstract The history of black women in Britain, particularly before the arrival of the Empire Windrush, is underresearched, and the histories we do have are largely ignored. In this article, biographies of young black women in Victorian London are revealed through the photographic and written archive of Barnardos. These documents allow a history of black women to be examined in the context of their own time. They add complexion to our current understanding of the Black Atlantic, and the relationships and histories that impact upon our identities today, as well as being a tool with which to interrogate British history.

Geographies of Belonging: white women and black history

This article discusses the need for, and possibilities of, writing integrated and multicultural histories of Britain by focusing on the relationships formed between white and black women in the workplace but primarily through their families. The article presents examples from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries which illustrate possibilities for examining integrated histories in urban and rural locations utilising ongoing research undertaken by community-based scholars. The article draws upon Hazel Carbys 1982 essay on the ‘Boundaries of Sisterhood’ to make connections between critics of the making of womens history in the 1980s and the continuing need for black histories to be integrated into British history.

Belonging in Europe

The European myths about identity and nationalism, citizenship and ownership, are the building blocks for Fortress Europe. While the latest wave of African incomers are found washed upon a Sicilian beach when the tide goes out: bloated, breath-less, anonymous.

Looking for Work: The Black Presence in Britain 1860–1920

Focusing on the years between 1860 and 1920, this paper considers how newspaper archives can contribute to our knowledge of the livelihoods of working black men and women. Although the empirical material comes predominately from the classified advertisement pages of digitalised English newspapers, references to Irish, Welsh and Scottish newspapers are also made. The types of advertisements highlighted here form two main areas for discussion. Firstly, men and women advertising their availability to work in a wide range of domestic roles. Secondly, employers who were looking for black men and women to perform particular roles. The adverts are short, no more than a few lines, but they mark out spaces in the archives where black men and women become temporarily visible. The reasons why these men and women appear in these advertisements raise complex questions about race, identity and the ways in which racism may have impacted upon their ability to work.

Staging race: Florence Mills, celebrity, identity and performance in 1920s Britain

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the time the African American performer Florence Mills spent in Britain in the 1920s. Mills was one of the most popular performers of the period, taking a lead in African American vaudeville productions, she was admired by working class and ‘elite’ black and white audiences. Our paper examines four examples of Mills’ British fan mail alongside newspaper reports of her performances in London. These reveal complex themes of identity, of Britishness, sexuality, gender and class within the context of changing international understandings of race relations in the Inter-war period. We utilise these letters alongside newspaper reports to consider how Mills’ presence in Britain as a performer and anti-racist activist influenced debates and personal reflections on racial identity, sexual desire and belonging to Britain.

Black Victorians and Anti-Caste : Mapping the Geographies of ‘Missing’ Readers

This chapter focuses upon the known and unknown readers of Anti-Caste, an early anti-racist periodical first published in Britain in 1888. Founded, produced and edited by a woman it was not a monthly concerned with ‘women’s issues’, but the forms of racial discrimination women and men faced within countries of the British Empire and the United States in the late nineteenth century. Anti-Caste’s articles reported on a range of international and local debates, from the increasing speed of European colonization in Africa, to everyday racism at restaurants, on trains and in employment. During my research on Anti-Caste I mapped its community of readers; they were a multi-ethnic and international collective, though mostly based in Britain. However, tracing British based readers who were black proved to be particularly difficult. This chapter explores why an anti-racist periodical in Britain might have failed to attract locally based black readers. It also argues that such an absence of real or implied readers can still raise important and productive questions, not only about reading communities and their experiences, but also about the broader communities among whom they lived and worked.