Postgraduate Course: Race, Community, and Resistance in Black Britain, 1900-90 (PGHC11646)
Course Outline
| School | School of History, Classics and Archaeology |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | What did it mean to be Black and British within an environment that positioned these identities as opposites? Between the first Pan-African conference of 1900 and the collapse of Thatcherism in 1990, Britain functioned as a space in which racialised subjects contested and constructed notions of citizenship, identity, and belonging. By centring the processes of race and racialisation within the experiences of the African diaspora, this course explores the unstable positions and trajectories of the Black people who complicated ideas of what it meant to be British during the twentieth century. |
| Course description |
This course investigates the Black citizens, thinkers, activists, and professionals who operated between the beginning of the twentieth century and the end of the 1980s. Each week of the course takes a thematic rather than a chronological approach, encouraging students to develop their ability to analyse change and continuity within key areas across the time period; although some weeks will naturally follow one another. Students will be able to situate these discussions of race and blackness within wider transformations across Britain, such as the interwar and wartime years, empire and decolonisation, deindustrialisation, social democracy, and neoliberalism.
In the first half of the course, through a series of case studies on specific themes and historical problems, students will develop an understanding of the fluid boundaries of Black Britain, and the complexities of constructing a Black British identity when those who pertain to it (but may reject the label) belonged to multiple generations of migrants, geographical areas, and ethnic backgrounds. Topics range from home and the workplace to youth and mixed-race identity in Britain. In the second half of the course, students will gain a greater understanding of the ways in which Black subjects resisted forms of racism and exclusion through activism, cultivating a sense of belonging, and rejecting (or embracing) the cultural and gender norms of wider society. Topics range from beauty and Black feminisms, to queer identities and the underacknowledged phenomenon of Black conservatism.
The study of History inevitably involves the study of difficult topics that we encourage students to approach in a respectful, scholarly, and sensitive manner. Nevertheless, we remain conscious that some students may wish to prepare themselves for the discussion of difficult topics. In particular, the course organiser has outlined that the following topics may be discussed in this course, whether in class or through required or recommended primary and secondary sources: racism and racial violence, sexual violence, and homophobia. While this list indicates sensitive topics students are likely to encounter, it is not exhaustive because course organisers cannot entirely predict the directions discussions may take in tutorials or seminars, or through the wider reading that students may conduct for the course.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2026/27, Not available to visiting students (SS1)
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Quota: 0 |
| Course Start |
Semester 1 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 22,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
174 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
90 %,
Practical Exam
10 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
Coursework:
1,500-word Source Analysis (30%)
3,500-word Essay (60%)
Non-written skills:
Seminar participation (10%) |
| Feedback |
Students will receive feedback on their coursework, and will have the opportunity to discuss that feedback further with the Course Organiser during their published office hours for this course or by appointment. |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Demonstrate competence in core skills in the study of history: essay-writing, independent reading, group discussion, listening and public speaking.
- Demonstrate, through source analysis, an ability to understand, evaluate, and utilise a variety of primary source material.
- Recognise and reflect critically on a variety of approaches to the history of race, racialisation, and blackness in Britain.
- Examine change and continuity within the experiences of blackness across the twentieth century and between different social groups.
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Reading List
Perry, Kennetta Hammond. London is the place for me: Black Britons, citizenship, and the politics of race. Oxford University Press, 2015.
Tabili, Laura. "The construction of racial difference in twentieth-century Britain: the special restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) order, 1925." Journal of British Studies 33, no.1 (1994): 54-98.
Waters, Rob. Thinking Black: Britain, 1964-1985. University of California Press, 2018.
Thomlinson, Natalie. Race, ethnicity and the women's movement in England, 1968-1993. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Bressey, Caroline. "Looking for blackness: considerations of a researcher's paradox." Ethics, Place & Environment 6, no. 3 (2003): 215-226.
Adi, Hakim, ed. Many struggles: New histories of African and Caribbean people in Britain. Pluto Books, 2023.
Bressey, Caroline. "Invisible presence: the whitening of the Black Community in the Historical Imagination of British Archives." Archivaria (2006): 47-61.
Waters, Rob. Colonized by humanity: Caribbean London and the politics of integration at the end of empire. Oxford University Press, 2023.
Bland, Lucy. Britain's 'brown babies': The stories of children born to black GIs and white women in the Second World War (Manchester University Press, 2019).
Okundaye, Jason. Revolutionary acts: Love & brotherhood in Black gay Britain. Faber & Faber, 2024.
Thorold, Jake. "Black political worlds in port cities: Garveyism in 1920s Britain." Twentieth Century British History 33, no. 1 (2022): 1-28 |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
1. Identify, evaluate, and deploy a range of evidence to understand Black experiences in twentieth-century Britain
2. Contribute to seminar discussions with confidence and and knowledge from the readings
3. Use empirical research to write with clarity and engage with the growing historiography
4. Develop racial literacy and the ability to approach issues of race with sensitivity and an informed understanding |
| Keywords | Not entered |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Miss Olivia Wyatt
Tel:
Email: owyatt@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | |
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