Kieran Connell

Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century

contextual impasto, Vieira also piles on many other contemporaneous developments including electrification, industrial accidents and technologies of colonial warfare. A chapter describing procedural reforms in New South Wales and Canada adds to the study of political interconnections across the Empire. In both cases, however, the main point seems to be that protagonists cited the 1882 changes at Westminster to justify their response to structural pressures on the business of their legislatures. The larger question, not posed here, is whether the influence of developments in the Imperial Parliament should be understood as a quasi-constitutional factor for settler colony legislatures, or whether invoking Westminster precedent was merely a political manifestation of the ‘colonial cringe’ as a fillip for advancing policies. Additionally, given the importance Vieira gives to the colonialist image of a masculine Gladstone beating back the rebellious Home Rulers, it would have been useful to learn how Australian Irish loyalties inflected the procedural debates in New South Wales and the sense of a shared transnational Britishness. Vieira’s engagement with his subject is clearly enriched by his prior experience as a legislative research assistant for the MP who chaired the Canadian House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. Beyond a strong command of procedural detail, he has genuine perspective on how parliamentary ideas flow across the legislatures of ‘Greater Britain’ and is sensitive to the fact that MPs are not just creatures of legislative dockets but also live and work amid broader social and cultural currents. The verve he brings to his writing helps enliven a subject as potentially recondite as parliamentary procedure, yet he sometimes makes assertions with little or no evidentiary support (such as generalisations about what MPs collectively were thinking and feeling) and is too ready to rely on unsubstantiated suppositions (e.g. ‘It seems improbable that these changes would not have impacted the discussions’ [p. 8]). Ultimately, the parts of this study don’t really come together as a coherent whole. To the extent that the procedural reforms of 1882 should be understood as a moment of modernising rupture, they are already widely acknowledged as an important turning point in Britain’s political development. Overall, however, Vieira adds to the historiography of procedural reform by connecting it to several recent areas of historical concern including modernity, masculinity and political connections across the greater British world.

The working practices of Birmingham's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies

This article offers a history of the working practices of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Based on extensive interviews with former members and on research into a new archive of the Centre, housed in the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham, it argues that cultural studies as practised in the 1970s was always a heterogeneous subject. The CCCS was heavily influenced by the events of 1968 when it tried to develop a new type of radical and collaborative research and teaching agenda. Despite Stuart Halls efforts to impose a focused link between politics and academic practice, the agenda soon gave way to a series of diverse and fruitful initiatives associated with the ‘sub-groups’ model of research.

Photographing Handsworth: photography, meaning and identity in a British inner city

ABSTRACT ‘If you say “Handsworth”’, the novelist Salman Rushdie remarked in 1986, ‘what do you see? Most people would see fire, riots, looted shops … and helmeted cops … a front page story.’ In the 1980s, ‘front page’ images of violence and disorder had come to define areas of black settlement such as Handsworth. However, for both Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, photography has the potential of unearthing alternative histories of black people in Britain. Connell explores how this might work in practice by taking Handsworth, an inner-city area of Birmingham, as its case study. Following the Handsworth riots in 1985, a photograph of the ‘black bomber’ appeared on the front page of every national tabloid newspaper, and Handsworth became conceptualized by the media as ‘Frontline Britain’. At the same time, there are numerous examples of photographs from within Handsworth that attempt to present a different view of the community: images taken at high-street portraiture studios, community photography projects and the documentary work of the professional photographers Vanley Burke and Pogus Caesar. What such images offer the historian, it will be shown, is not clear cut. Photographs from within Handsworth are suggestive of possible themes in any alternative history of race in Britain, particularly in their emphasis on everyday life. However, Connell shows that it is also necessary to understand what is often the unacknowledged politics behind these images, something that makes them—in differing ways—as problematic as the stereotypical narratives presented on the front pages of tabloid newspapers.

Policing the Crisis 35 Years On

This essay reviews the ‘35th anniversary edition’ of Policing the Crisis, the jointly-authored investigation into race, immigration, ‘mugging’ and the ‘crisis in hegemony’ of 1970s Britain. The new edition is demonstrative of the books enduring influence, including amongst historians increasingly turning their attention towards the roots, development and reach of Thatcherism. This essay places the remarkably prescient conceptual interventions made in Policing in the context of the conditions in which it was produced. Drawing on the authors wider work on the history of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies—where the authors of Policing were based—it argues the book should also be read for the insight it provides into the development of cultural studies as a fledging field of inquiry. A broader re-engagement with the work of the so-called ‘Birmingham school’, it is suggested, offers one way of historians developing accounts of 1970s and 1980s Britain that are not overdetermined by the arrival of ‘Thatcherism’.