What this tells me is that there must be general ignorance of this activism, which has, after all, been documented by many of us.

Did anyone go to this seminar?

 

 

• http://www.history.ac.uk/aac2009/abstracts/cosmopolitan-cities.html

Marc Matera (Northern Arizona University), Black Internationalism and Cosmopolitan London in the 1930s and 1940s

My paper comes from the manuscript for a book entitled London and the Rise of Black Internationalism. A global city and the capital of the far-flung British Empire, London became the frontline in the black struggle against British imperialism and racism during the 1930s. Caribbean and African intellectuals, university students, artists and activists in London formed organisations that became homes away from home, centres of cultural and intellectual exchange, and new means of voicing social commentary and political dissent. Through them, they influenced the political imagination of British colonial officials, politicians, and others interested in Africa and the colonies, contributing to the major fluctuations in colonial policy in the final decades of imperial rule. Many Caribbean and African men and women embraced black internationalism as an expression of the spirit of the age and a necessary counter to the resurgence of virulent nationalisms and the potential internationalisation of imperialism for the first time within the citys cosmopolitan environs. From the West African Students Union in Camden Town to cramped apartments in Euston and Hampstead, from the university seminar to Sohos nightclubs, London played a central role in the development of black internationalism because of the conversations, alliances, and boundary crossings which only the metropole made possible. This history transforms our understanding of the development of anticolonialism as well as the cultural landscape of late imperial London.