Reading the Riot by Eddie Chambers

READING THE RIOT ACT EDDIE CHAMBERS

EXTRACT FROM Visual Culture in Britain DATE 17 April 2013 SOURCE Courtesy of the Author

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Reading the Riot Act Eddie Chambers Published online: 17 Apr 2013.

To cite this article: Eddie Chambers (2013): Reading the Riot Act, Visual Culture in Britain, DOI:10.1080/14714787.2013.782156 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2013.782156

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Eddie Chambers

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Reading the Riot Act

This article explores some of the ways in which the act of rioting has been visualized, firstly within reggae music and secondly within the work of several black British artists. The article begins with a consideration of images of burning buildings that were captured during the course of the riots in England in the summer of 2011, before briefly discussing some of the pitfalls in the terminology and language of the ‘riot’. The article discusses the somewhat counter-cultural view of rioting as reflected in reggae music, and the profoundly empathetic view of rioters that is arguably advanced in the work of several key black British artists, across several generations. It argues that the works it discusses do much to shed light on why any given riot, involving black people, takes place.

Keywords: rioting, reggae music, black British history, black British artists, album covers

London, summer 2011. In a scene replicated across the capital, a huge home furnishings shop is ablaze. The spectacle is a veritable display of dramatic pyrotechnics, as near-theatrical explosions are emitted through the orifices of the building that is, by now, way beyond any sort of saving.

One such store was House of Reeves in Croydon, south London, which, like other such ill-fated buildings, dominated the street intersections of a city block (Figure 1). The store had first opened in 1867 and had, so sections of the British press were fond of recounting, survived two world wars. This snippet of information was meant to be much more than an incidental detail. The fact that House of Reeves had survived the First World War was pretty much neither here nor there – the urban fabric of Britain was hardly troubled by the Great War. Instead, its casualties were the young men of Europe, who died in unprecedented and quite horrific numbers on the battlefields of Europe. But surviving the Blitz and the Second World War was quite another matter. Contemporary constructions of Britain’s national identity were heavily reliant on notions that this plucky, undersiege, sceptred isle had withstood the onslaught of Hitler’s sustained bombing campaigns and had emerged bloodied but unbowed. Not only that: Britain and its characteristic bulldog spirit, under the guidance of Winston Churchill, had emerged victorious in the fight against fascism and the fight for freedom and justice. In this regard, House of Reeves had stood as a beacon of British steely resolve in the face of intimidation, and it was this resolve that, in part at least, made Britain the great nation it was.

By destroying the store, those responsible had, according to sections of the media, raised a metaphorical middle finger to Britain’s self-image.1 There is something quite mesmerizing about photographs of the largest burning buildings that were (along with the tragic loss of human life) the most conspicuous casualties of the summer riots. This might, in part at least, Visual Culture in Britain, 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2013.782156 # 2013 Taylor & Francis

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Figure 1. House of Reeves.

Photo: Eddie Mulholland.

Reproduced by permission of Telegraph Media Group Limited (TMG).

have something to do with the self-evident inability of fire fighters to contain, let alone extinguish, these towering infernos. In the course of our regular day-to-day, month-to-month, year-to-year existence, we would never see buildings so spectacularly ablaze. Most fires in our towns and cities are isolated occurrences, rapidly brought under control, by sprinkler systems or the brisk deployment of fire fighters. The image of riot-torn neighbourhoods, frequently distinguished by the trope of the well-ablaze building, represents a different kind of urban environment, one made over in the rioters’ image. It is this notion, of the visualizing of the different spaces created by rioters, that this article seeks to explore.

While riots have taken place for centuries, in a great many different countries, settings and circumstances, I propose to explore the notion of the riot as it exists in aspects of contemporary Caribbean visual and aural culture. (And in turn, the ways in which such cultural resonances have arguably made their way into the psyche of rioters in England.)

Over the past several decades, a significant proportion of the riots in mainland Britain have involved some proportion or other of AfricanCaribbean males.2 In some instances, the proportion, or numbers, of African-Caribbean youth caught up in rioting may well be relatively small – Britain’s black population is, in percentage terms, very much at the modest end of the single-figure spectrum – but, given the factor of conspicuousness, the darker skins of black British youngsters mean that they are invariably the ones identified by the police and the media as being key participants in riots that occur. The pathology whereby the riot becomes raced is perhaps most explicit in the American terminology, race riot. When a percentage of those caught up in urban unrest in American cities are perceived to be black, the mainstream media tend to label such disturbances as race riots. There is, though, no equivalent or corresponding term for when whites riot. Consequently, the Tulsa Riot of May 31 and June 1, 1921 (which was a widespread, racially motivated conflict, in which whites attacked and effectively destroyed the thriving African American

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neighbourhoods of Tulsa, Oklahoma) has by and large passed into obscurity, not being typically regarded as a race riot in the commonly understood use of the term. Furthermore, the dominant society has, seemingly without difficulty, created a pathological space in which to effortlessly insert the notion of the menacing black troublemaker. As Kobena Mercer has noted, ‘On the front page headlines black males become highly visible as a threat to white society, as muggers, rapists, terrorists and guerrillas: their bodies become the imago [sic] of a savage and unstoppable capacity for destruction and violence’.3 At this point, terminology is of considerable importance. One struggles, more often than not, to identify an alternative word that is free from the media’s notion of a riot. Mainstream press coverage of riots inevitably cast them as mindless anarchic sprees of criminality, in which the mob, consisting by and large of incorrigibly feral youth, go on the rampage. This seemingly indelible association with mindless violence ensures that the word riot is in essence, hugely problematic. Sections of the British media, seeking an easily understood and easily digestible summation, labelled the 2011 riots as ‘shopping with violence’. The term, though, does little to nothing to deepen any sort of genuine understanding of what happened during those days. Yet we run into difficulties when reaching for alternative adjectives for burning and looting, as Martin Kettle and Lucy Hodges have found and discussed.4 Existing English law, for instance, defines a riot in a very specific way. It requires three or more people with a common purpose to be prepared to help one another, by force if necessary, against anyone opposing them. If they then carry out that purpose and force or violence takes place that would ‘alarm at least one person of reasonable firmness and courage’, then, says the law, that is a riot.5

The limitations of legal definitions of what constitutes a riot were thrown into sharp relief in the summer of 2011, in a number of English cities. A quasi-official report6 and no end of press and media coverage notwithstanding, it is impossible to determine categorically that those caught up in the rioting were acting with any sort of ‘common purpose’. And, rather than being ‘prepared to help one another’, looters are more likely to be motivated by what they themselves as individuals can harvest from any given opportunity for looting that might present itself or be created. Kettle and Hodges continued: ‘The common usage of the word is, however, much broader. Most people would probably agree that when a large group of people use violence in public against people or property and the authorities cannot immediately control them, then that is a riot.’ Quite correctly, the authors added, ‘Even so, this leaves scope for disagreement and different interpretations. Some would object on principle to the use of the word riot at all.’

Precisely what sort of number might constitute ‘a large group of people’, Kettle and Hodges do not volunteer. The nub of Kettle and Hodge’s assertion was that ‘[t]he use of the word riot is therefore a problem. But none of the other words that have been used causes any less difficulty.

Hooliganism, public disorder, protest, rebellion, uprising – all present their own problems. In the circumstances, "riot" will have to do’.

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But, while we might be stuck, for better or for worse, with the term ‘riot’, there is no unanimity about its meaning, though certain meanings – such as those advanced by the police, the government and sections of the media – do of course dominate. Setting such meanings to one side, I seek to explore what amounts to a counter-cultural perspective on rioting, as visualized within the iconography of reggae music and by a number of black British artists. I would argue that the riot could be understood as an attempt by rioters to apply something of an extreme makeover to the decidedly problematic spaces (neighbourhoods, high streets, shopping centres) in which the rioters find themselves or to which they gravitate.

The images of burning buildings such as House of Reeves resonate with righteous retribution heaped upon the avaricious and the ungodly. We can, without difficulty, compare mid- to late-twentieth/early-twenty-firstcentury visual tropes of riot-affected burning buildings, such as the blazing and doomed House of Reeves store, with Victorian apocalyptic paintings such as John Martin’s The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, of 1852.

Martin, who was one of the most popular painters in Britain of his day, specialized in vast canvases of the ancient world in chaos, and ungodly cities in the grip of godly retribution.7 Like the image of the burning furniture store a century and a half later, Martin’s Sodom and Gomorrah is a veritable display of dramatic pyrotechnics, as awesome and catastrophic fire and brimstone rain down in righteous damnation of the godless city, which is, by now, way beyond any sort of saving by God or man.

Furthermore, twentieth- and twenty-first-century images of buildings and shops burning out of control represent, in the most graphic of ways, a failure to heed reggae group Culture’s stern admonition to ‘Mr Rich Man’ to ‘share the riches with the poor, before they share their poverty with you’.8 These images represent a visualizing of a day of reckoning – capitalism (or at least, its accessible symbols) being given something of an urban shakedown: those shops that could be plundered being duly relieved of their inventories and other buildings, other property, going to blazes.

Certain riots have occurred at key historical points that have served to benchmark the birth and testy growth of black Britain. As such, the ‘rioter’ has on occasion been framed as occupying a certain blessed position in the vanguard of struggle. A. Sivanandan recalled, ‘By the middle of the 1970s, the youth had begun to emerge into the vanguard of black struggle. And they brought to it not only the traditions of their elders but an experience of their own, which was implacable [sic] of racism and impervious to the blandishments of the state.’9 This position frequently and most clearly took the form of an active resistance to police ‘downpression’. The police came to symbolize and embody the forces, the institutions and the various forms of endless pressure that tormented so much of young black Britain. By the mid-1970s, this resistance was beginning to take the form of anti-police ‘rioting’. The ‘inner-city’ riot was, for young black Britain, a new voice, a new form of expression. Armed with the weapons of the weapon-less, ‘bottles and bricks and sticks’,10 some young black males refused to yield territory, their territory, without a fight and gladly, willingly, shouldered

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Figure 2. A youth carrying a fire-bomb on the second day of the Handsworth riots in Birmingham. # Press Association Images.

the burden of self-appointed ghetto defenders. A number of black British artists made work that effectively empathized with these youths. Donald Rodney, one of the artists discussed in this text, would make extensive use of a newspaper photograph of such a ghetto defender, described as a ‘prowling West Indian petrol bomber’ who made an appearance in several newspapers (Figure 2). The lone youth pictured strode purposefully, confidently, righteously (some might say menacingly) with petrol bomb in hand, presumably identifying and approaching his quarry, during the course of a riot in Rodney’s native Birmingham. In bestowing on this ‘rioter’ an almost iconic status, Donald Rodney, like Linton Kwesi Johnson before him, was underlining the militancy, dedication, consciousness and importance of these ghetto youths who were ‘measuring the time for bombs and for burnin’.11 In their book, Race, Politics and Social Change, John Solomos and Les Black describe and contextualize the press image as follows: The dominant newspaper image was a picture of a young black man carrying a lit petrol bomb. The picture . . . documented a skirmish that took place in the aftermath of a visit to Birmingham by the Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd. The Daily Express, the Mirror, the Sun, the Observer and the Daily Mail all used the photograph. The papers announced the arrival of the latest racial insurgent: ‘He walks with a chilling swagger, a petrol bomb in hand and hate burning in his heart.’ (Daily Telegraph, September 11, 1985)

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Solomos and Black then quoted a wholly fictitious account which, in the manner of such reports, had rapidly assumed the status of irrefutable fact that chimed with dominant pathologies of violent, derelict, homicidal black youth, to which images of industrious, entrepreneurial Asians provided such a stark and noble contrast.

A black thug stalks a Birmingham street with hate in his eyes and a petrol bomb in his hand.

The prowling West Indian was one of the hoodlums who brought new race terror to the city’s riot-torn Handsworth district yesterday . . . Two Asian brothers screamed in agony as West Indian rioters beat them – and left them to burn alive in the petrol-bombed sub-post office.

(Sun, September 11, 1985)

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As Solomos and Black reasoned: The dominant theme of the reporting of these events suggested that a ‘race riot’ had taken place and that the death of the Moledina brothers was a result of tension between the AfricanCaribbean and Asian communities. This was despite factual details such as the presence of large numbers of whites and Asians on the streets who were arrested during this incident, and the fact that the person charged for the Molendina murders was in fact white.

Subsequently, the researchers summarized: ‘The ‘‘black mugger’’ was surpassed by a new folk demon, the ‘‘black bomber’’. This shift not only associated black youth with crimes against the person but also crimes against society.’12 Fire, that most primeval of elements, has a place of great significance in New World African diaspora culture. Fire is a longstanding metaphor for light and assorted manifestations of illumination. But it is also a symbol of judgement, destruction and God’s day of reckoning. In the words of the Negro spiritual, ‘God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time’. Within the abiding imagery of the riot, we see not so much the fire next time, as the fire this time. The notion of the fire this time was seized upon by the Economist, which used the words as the title of one of its reports on the disturbances of summer 2011.13 This notion of willing the fire to do its best (or, perhaps, do its worst) has an absorbing and compelling antecedent in the legendary phrase ‘Burn, Baby, Burn’.14 Though many riots have no explicit racial dimension, what some might regard as a satisfying spectacle, of justifiable conflagration, is indelibly linked to centuries of dreadful treatment meted out to black people, beginning with the slave ship and the auction block. Destruction by fire is God’s work, and the looters, who seemingly are an intrinsic component of the riot, take up where God left off. The popular counter-cultural framing of the riot is, I would argue, one that takes as its blueprint the seminal track by the Wailers, ‘Burnin’ and Lootin’’, taken from their 1973 album, Burnin’.

In ‘Burnin’ and Lootin’’ Marley had named and identified the riot as a positive act of purification, redemption and political integrity. This audacious and profoundly empathetic act struck an international cord with fractious black British youngsters and Jamaican ghetto sufferers alike.

Thereafter, rioting would never be considered by many of those caught up in such situations as being the negative, destructive and anarchic act that others, particularly the mainstream media and the forces of ‘law and order’ took it to be. When the Wailers sang: ‘That’s why we’re gonna be

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burnin’ and a-lootin’ tonight ... burnin’ all illusions tonight, burnin’ all pollution tonight’ rioting was, for some people at least, for evermore transformed from a violent expression of protest against perceived injustices into an almost sacred act of righteousness, of purification, of judgement. Four years later, British reggae group Merger again celebrated the ‘riot’ in a song called ‘77’. Offering a transgressive alternative to the Queen’s Silver Jubilee celebrations of 1977, they sang about the year being ‘a festival of destruction time’.15 Maureen Sheridan offered the following appraisal of ‘Burnin’ and Lootin’:

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‘Dat song about burnin’ and lootin’ is [about] illusions . . . the illusions of capitalists and dem people with the big bank accounts,’ said Marley.

To say that ‘Burnin’ and Lootin’’ was controversial in a country where angry, frustrated people routinely block roads with burning tires just to have their voice heard, is far too mild a way to describe the song’s actual impact. Jamaica’s volatile society has always been open to the incendiary messages of its musical idols. Although Marley could say a couple of years later that the tune was about ‘illusions’, what it was really about was ‘burnin’ and lootin;’ and giving the ghetto youth the go-ahead to help themselves.

Curfews are no longer as common as they were in the Seventies, and when they’re enforced, they’re usually warranted. But as well as being useful in curbing spontaneous outbreaks of violence, curfews are a clever way to control rebellion. With the growing influence of Rasta and reggae music, rebellion of the self-styled ‘sufferahs’ was but a drum beat away, and the authorities had to find a way to stop it.

‘Babylon nuh waan peace, Babylon waan power,’ was Bob’s defence of his militant approach. ‘My songs have a message of righteousness’, he explained. But in another interview, he made it clear that he wasn’t a pacifist. ‘Me don’ love fighting, but me don’ love wickedness either.’16

A number of black artists found themselves charmed by Marley’s reference to the burning of illusions and pollution. In 1981, filmmaker Menelik Shabazz had made a feature-length film which he titled Burning an Illusion.

Its publicity described it as being ‘the story of a black woman’s awakening’. Years later, in conversation with Lubaina Himid, Donald Rodney referred to some of the influences that lay behind the making of one of his pieces: The Lords of Humankind (1986). This was a work, dealing with slavery and the political and psychological consequences of its aftermath, that relied heavily on written text, surrounding central images of a shackled slave and plans of slave ships crammed with human cargo. The images and text were executed on cotton sheets that were then extensively burned around parts of their edges. The sheets, when suspended from the gallery ceiling, came to resemble a grouping of flags, displaying a terrible assortment of exigent messages. Himid referred to the burned and conspicuously damaged nature of the work. Rodney responded ‘I burnt the flags, that’s what that’s about. Burning that type of history ... I love that phrase – ‘‘burning an illusion’’ – that’s probably why I use burning a lot.’17 ‘Burnin’ and Lootin’’ came out of a particular moment in Jamaica’s history. Merely a decade after the country’s independence, ushered in with so much pronounced optimism, Jamaica was by the early 1970s in the grip of inflation, economic stagnation, labour unrest and the politically sponsored terrorism that held so many Jamaicans in fear and trembling.

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Furthermore, the island’s police, particularly in the densely populated capital city of Kingston and its socially challenged neighbourhoods, had quickly come to represent and embody a repressive public body, seemingly there to further brutalize the Jamaican sufferer. It was in this context that the song ‘Burnin’ and Lootin’’ bridled at oppression and proposed a point of release for those who ‘couldn’t take it no more’. This blending, this articulation, of frustration, disaffection, political consciousness and rioting was but one manifestation of the socially charged nature of reggae music. The music has always been extraordinarily diverse in its rhythms, lyrics and messages, though the pronounced influence of Rastafari presents itself as a hugely important strand of the music.18 Reggae music has spawned no end of British manifestations, from the music of groups such as Merger, Capital Letters, Black Slate, Aswad, Cimarons and Steel Pulse through to later developments such as jungle, hip hop, electronic, ragga, drum ’n’ bass, dancehall, garage, grime and dubstep. This astonishing diversity reflects reggae’s importance to current generations of British ‘subcultures’ (black, white, Asian, etc.) While these recent and current generations of subcultures might view roots reggae and Bob Marley as ancient historical antecedents, it is unquestionable that music such as ‘Burnin’ and Lootin’’ and other songs by the Wailers created an enduring template that is to this day a discernible and recognizable characteristic of the narratives of more contemporary manifestations of reggae.19 An intriguing consideration is the possibility that these assorted musical/subcultural manifestations have been linked to a certain mainstream tendency over recent years to ‘racialize’ the white underclass (most explicitly since the riots of 2011) in terms previously reserved for traditionally racist discourse, thus hinting not only at the continuing significance of (some of) reggae’s political messages, but perhaps even their passage from the ‘margins’ to the centre. The historian David Starkey offered a somewhat unvarnished distillation of this sentiment. Using a pejorative vernacular expression for a certain embodiment of trashy white working-class culture, Starkey, speaking on BBC 2’s Newsnight at the height of the riots, referenced the previously mentioned notion of ‘shopping with violence’ and expressed the view that the riots reflected a pervasive and somewhat sinister influence of Jamaican culture on pockets of the English populace.

What this week has shown is that profound changes have happened . . . What’s happened is that a substantial section of the chavs . . . have become black. The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion, and black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language together. This language, which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois, that’s been intruded in England. And this is why so many of us have this sense of literally [living in] a foreign country.20

The immediate visualization of reggae music – the reggae record cover – is replete with the images and symbolism of destruction and consumption by fire, with all its biblical resonances. One need look no further than the record covers produced to house recordings by first the Wailers, then by Bob Marley and the Wailers, during the groups’ years with Island Records.

The first Island Records release was Catch a Fire. Characteristic of the

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flexibility of Jamaican patois, the title was both descriptive and imploring.

The original 1973 vinyl record sleeve was one of the most singular in the history of album-cover graphic design, and was the work of graphic artists Rod Dyer and Bob Weiner. The 12-inch record was encased in a cardboard sleeve depicting that most iconic of American lighters, the Zippo. The sleeve functioned like the casing of a real Zippo lighter, opening at a side hinge to reveal the record within. When the upper ‘lid’ of the Zippo sleeve was opened, there appeared a giant flame, printed on the previously concealed part of the sleeve. In effect, each time the record sleeve was opened, as a prelude to the record itself being played, the holder of the sleeve was sparking a near literal but primarily metaphorical flame, to light a marijuana cigarette, to illuminate a path through life (the playing of the record itself, with its multiple, timely and prophetic messages)21 or to ‘bun dung Babylon’. The original pressing of 20,000 copies of Catch a Fire had the functional Zippo cover and subsequent pressings had the alternative (and more practical, but much less dramatic) cover featuring a portrait of Bob Marley openly and unapologetically smoking a marijuana spliff or joint.

Following shortly after Catch a Fire was Burnin’, the sleeve of which featured the title and name of the group burned (or perhaps branded is a better word) into horizontal wooden planks, reminiscent of the walls of the sorts of shacks that ghetto dwellers, from Kingston to Nairobi to Soweto, might build for themselves. The back of the sleeve, a gatefold, again depicted Bob Marley openly, defiantly, unapologetically smoking a marijuana spliff or joint. This time though, the portrait was in profile and, in keeping with the group’s faces on the front of the sleeve, was dramatically tone-eliminated, leaving only the salient features of the singers and musicians.22 Notwithstanding the power and dynamism of the Catch a Fire and Burnin’ record sleeves, perhaps the most sophisticated Bob Marley and the Wailers record sleeve to resonate with aesthetics of fire and brimstone was Natty Dread of 1975. Designed by Tony Wright, the record sleeve, perhaps more than any other, brought forth Rastafarian warnings of the imminent destruction of Babylon and, indeed, the severest obligations placed on God’s chosen people, if not to ‘bun dung Babylon’, then at least to flee it. It was on the Natty Dread record sleeve – possibly the most unlikely of places – that another of John Martin’s brimstone, fire and damnation paintings made an appearance. But perhaps the sleeve in question was not so unlikely after all. The record cover’s designer, Tony Wright, offered this fascinating recollection, I was asked to paint a portrait of Bob Marley for Natty Dread. I had the face painted in and wanted a ‘mayhem’ for a background but I was afraid the effect would be lightweight and cartoonish. In the ‘Tate Gallery’ in London I found a Victorian room with John Martin’s ‘The Great Day of His Wrath’. It was perfect. God destroying Babylon ... Using a classical painting as the background gave the piece a weighty and serious quality.23

Hidden in plain sight, as a background to an impassive portrait of Bob Marley, the singer’s face etched with measured resolve, there lay a cropped detail of John Martin’s The Great Day of His Wrath. It was, as

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Wright recalled, the most perfect of fits. Other reggae record covers, of recordings by other artists, have sought to visualize the riot. Of particular relevance was the cover of Dread Beat and Blood, a 1978 record referred to in the notes to this text. The sleeve featured a stark but fetching pen and ink drawing of a riot in a progress, as seen from the lines of the rioters. The main protagonist, a young woman, bottle in hand, strides forward, with great confidence, about to stalk or confront the massed ranks of police who stand, battle-ready, some distance off. Alongside her, a much younger boy also prepares to join battle. He too has a projectile in hand.

A number of British artists of African-Caribbean background have produced key works that reference the nature and the occurrence of the riot in the making of black Britain’s history.24 Frequently, the stock symbolism of such artworks is the image of fire, or, more accurately perhaps, the image of fire created by the flight of petrol bombs, the weapon often associated with rioters and rioting. This text looks at key works by three such practitioners, Donald Rodney (1961–98), Tam Joseph (b. 1947), and Kimathi Donkor (b. 1965). In referencing the ‘riot’, artists such as these were simultaneously referencing key milestones – albeit traumatic ones – in the making of black Britain. (The ‘riots’ of Bristol in 1980 and those that occurred in other parts of the country, most notably Brixton, in 1981 had, for several decades thereafter, dominated the terms of reference for black people’s presence in Britain.)

One such work is Tam Joseph’s The Sky at Night, made in response to rioting that was, in turn, a response to the maiming of one black woman and the death of another, in the mid-1980s. On Saturday September 28, 1985, Mrs Cherry Groce, a black woman, was shot and paralysed during a police raid on her home in London. Groce was, allegedly, shot in her bed, by a member of a team of armed police officers who were looking for her son. Another, divergent account has it that, a team of armed officers went to the home of Mrs Cherry Groce in Brixton, South London, to arrest her son, Michael, who was wanted for [allegations of] armed robbery. In fact, Michael Groce, no longer lived there. The officers smashed down the door with a sledge-hammer and then an inspector rushed in shouting ‘armed police’. Mrs Groce says the officer suddenly rushed at her, pointing a gun at her. She tried to run back but he shot her. She is now paralysed and confined to a wheelchair.25

Groce’s maiming sparked rioting in the vicinity of Brixton, a district of south London which had witnessed extensive rioting four years earlier, in 1981. The sense of black Britain being a community under siege and on the unanswered receiving end of casual but deadly state-sanctioned violence was further heightened within a matter of days of Groce’s horrific injuries being sustained. On Sunday October 6, 1985, another black woman, Mrs Cynthia Jarrett, died of a heart attack during a police search of her Tottenham home.26 (Again, it was allegations against her son that lay at the centre of this police action.) During the mid-1980s there were many other such personal tragedies that ultimately spoke of the black British presence being a somewhat fractious or ill-at-ease one. It was during the ‘rioting’ on the Broadwater Farm estate, sparked by news of Mrs Jarrett’s death, that PC Blakelock was isolated from his fellow police officers and set

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upon and killed by what was commonly referred to at the time, in the press and media, as a ‘mob’.27 In keeping with the times, there was much about black artists’ practice during the 1980s that inculcated and declared multiple senses of opposition, alienation and protest.

In 1986, Donald Rodney held an exhibition in London, at a venue known as the Black-Art Gallery. The exhibition was titled the ‘Atrocity Exhibition’, and the poster for it was a remarkable construction. The main body of the poster featured a close-up image of a black youth’s expressionless face, reproduced in the form of a stark, tone-eliminated screen print. Below the youth’s desolate eyes ran a rough white strip that literally obliterated much of the nose and cheeks of the boy’s face. On to this white strip was printed the exhibition’s title and other necessary information. But it was what was happening within the lower reaches of the poster that marked it out as exceptional. As mentioned earlier, it was injuries inflicted on one black woman and the fatality of another that formed the core grievances that sparked riots in the mid-1980s.

Memories of these riots were fresh in the mind of Rodney when he set about making work for the exhibition, and, in time, making the poster itself. Groce’s tragedy, which had occurred about a year before Rodney’s exhibition, was all the more poignant because the only image of her that was circulated within the press and media in the aftermath of her injuries was lifted from a wedding photograph. The cropped photograph, taken several decades earlier, showed Groce wearing her wedding day fineries.

No other photograph of the hapless victim that may have existed was made available.

Reports of Groce’s injuries and Jarrett’s death sparked widespread rioting throughout the Brixton area of south London and the Tottenham area of north London respectively. It was from the press coverage of these riots that Rodney gleaned his image, mentioned earlier, of the avenging ghetto defender. Across the lower part of Rodney’s poster, in a stark horizontal strip, Rodney had placed torn, fragmented images of Cherry Groce, the left half of her wedding day portrait running off the left-hand edge of the poster. Correspondingly, the right half of the same picture ran off the righthand side of the poster. Literally and metaphorically torn in two, the area vacated (or the space opened up) became occupied by Rodney’s rioter, complete with his newspaper caption describing him (‘A youth brandishes a petrol bomb’). Rodney made it clear that for him the youth represented militancy, dedication and revolutionary consciousness. On either side of the petrol bomber Rodney had placed a quote by the Caribbean-born writer Neville Dawes (Neville had, on the poster, been spelt ‘Nevil’). The quote read: The day of transition is a long one that is the lesson of all conscious revolutions. The revolutionary by the way, is not a man/woman with a gun aimed at a few priviledged [sic] people – that is a gangster, a bandit. A revolution begins when a whole people stand behind a gun as a symbol and fact, and aim it against their suffering as a negative weapon, and towards their release as a positive machine, capable of moving mountains.

As far as Rodney was concerned, his ‘likkle ghetto yout [sic]’ was central to the revolutionary vision spelled out by Dawes. And, in turn, what

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Figure 3. Tam Joseph, The Sky at Night, acrylic on canvas, 134 x 235 cm, 1985. # Tam Joseph.

happened to Cherry Groce and Cynthia Jarrett could act as a revolutionary catalyst. Cause and effect, action and reaction. This was the first of a number of times that Rodney’s revolutionary friend would make an appearance in Rodney’s work.

It was during this pivotal decade that so much highly effective and penetrating work, commenting on a wide range of current social concerns, was produced by a number of black artists. Broadwater Farm was an area of north London that was not much more than a mile or so away from the home of artist Tam Joseph. Perhaps, given the geographical proximity of the scene of such cataclysmic events, Joseph responded to the bloody events of October 1985 by painting, in the same year, The Sky at Night, a work of astonishing clarity, gravity and sophistication (Figure 3). The painting was a depiction of the riot under way on Broadwater Farm, after dusk.28 It featured as its central component a daunting block of flats, at the base of and in front of which scattered groups of rioters hurled occasional petrol bombs at assembled ranks of riot police. A dramatic and ominous cleavage, in the form of a lift shaft or stairwell, separates the two wings of the block of flats, conveniently creating or reinforcing the two sides of the conflict or stand-off. At the base of one side of the building stand the police. Facing them, at the base of the other side of the building, stand the onlookers, among whom the police’s tormentors are presumably mingling. Given the drama of the scene depicted, The Sky at Night is nevertheless a quiet, almost understated painting. Though Broadwater Farm is depicted, the block of flats shown could be almost anywhere in the country, or could be located in other parts of the world, in cities scarred by bloated income differentials and urban deprivation. The architecture depicted is reminiscent of the projects – the high-density inner-city housing that is home to so many of the USA’s poorer black, Hispanic and other low-income families. On a smaller scale perhaps, the equivalent dwellings in Jamaica, reflective of state attempts to provide accommodation for its poorer citizens, were referred to or known as government housing schemes (or government yard as Bob Marley and the Wailers had sung in

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their emotive classic of the mid-1970s, ‘No Woman No Cry’).29 Elsewhere in the world, in the cities of France, such high-density housing – this time traditionally located on the outskirts of cities – is known as, or referred to as, la banlieue.30 Housing estates, council estates, projects, housing schemes, la banlieue . . . in all instances, from Glasgow to Paris, Kingston to London, the government housing strategy has often been to erect what are often charmless brutalist boxes in which those with few housing options are forced to live literally on top of one another. Not only did hapless residents have to live cheek by jowl in such housing, there were often few amenities, such as good schools, good shops, good health care, libraries, parks or gardens in close proximity to these concrete jungles.

Another Caribbean-born artist to produce a compelling work commenting on the corrosive nature and effects of poor housing conditions was Terry Boddie, from the island of Nevis, in the eastern Caribbean. His grim, yet hugely engaging, print Blueprint featured a dramatic juxtaposition of an anonymous and grim tower block with a detail of the infamous ‘Plan of a Slave Ship’ depicting similarly anonymous African bodies, packed like so many non-human entities into every available space of the slave ship.

Thus, Boddie challenges the viewer with a most startling thesis: that the compartmentalizing of black people into wretched and miserable housing conditions is in so many ways reflective of the historical dehumanizing of captured Africans during the centuries of horror that were the Atlantic slave trade.

Previously, the Wailers had bemoaned the formidable constraints of the ‘concrete jungle’,31 and it was this sense of Fanon’s ‘wretched of the earth’ being corralled into urban ghettoes that so exercised Joseph. The nocturnal nature of the scene depicted had the eerie effect of muting the sense of inner-city unrest. None of the figures in the painting appeared overly animated. The groups of policemen and those intent on driving them out both appeared almost lethargic, as if darkness or nightfall has slowed them down. Given the media’s caricaturing of the ‘mob’, most people in The Sky at Night appear to be bystanders and, to all intents and purposes, observers of what is happening in their midst. Lights are on in a number of the flats, thereby illuminating in silhouette those who also are spectators or witnesses. The groups of police officers are dramatically depicted with fires – the results of petrol bombs – burning close by and in front of them and their riot shields. The light from the fires throws a number of the police officers into sharp and eerie relief, their dark outlines dramatically silhouetted by the flames. Rather than a scene of bloodlust, destruction and mayhem, in its particularly restrained way The Sky at Night shows a community of exhausted and weary people, a few of whom, under cover of darkness and a familiarity with the cut-throughs and walkways of the estate, are seeking to do battle with the police.

In the wake of the ‘riots’ at the beginning of the decade, social deprivation and poor housing among black people had emerged as one of the underlying factors of the disturbances. Here, in dramatic fashion, Joseph presented the viewer with the cause and the effect, the action and the reaction. With its reliance on the modernist grid, The Sky at Night was, perhaps more than anything else, a commentary on the failure of post-war

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urban planning. High-density tower blocks and equivalent low-rise housing were supposed to provide a brave new solution to both chronic housing shortages and a need to move people out of dilapidated and inferior housing built some considerable time ago. But by the mid-1980s estates such as Broadwater Farm, though conceived as idyllic and desirable places to live, now stood as near-conclusive evidence of the limitations, failures and, indeed, the consequences of bad housing, particularly when unemployment and tales of police brutality and harassment were added to the mix.

The titling of the piece has great significance, reminiscent as it is of the long-running astronomy programme on BBC television, famously fronted

by Sir Patrick Moore. First aired well over half a century ago, The Sky at Night was perhaps a comforting throwback to how television used to be, how life used to be, how society used to be, before all of these things became ever more mixed up and frenetic as the century wore on. In that regard, the BBC’s The Sky at Night was a polar opposite, in more ways than one, to Joseph’s painting of the same name. Moore, the holder of political views associated with far-right policies, was in the 1970s chairman of a grouping known as the United Country Party, which, like the National Front, was anti-immigration. Moore was then involved in the United Country Party’s successor, known as the New Britain Party, which like its predecessor campaigned to curb, halt or reverse immigration, at a time when immigration was particularly synonymous with people from the Commonwealth countries such as India, Pakistan and the countries of Africa and the Caribbean. Joseph’s reference to The Sky at Night represented not only urban skirmishes after nightfall in north London, but also the anti-immigrant sentiments that were expressed by Patrick Moore at a time of particular racial violence meted out to black people in Britain. And yet, aspects of the BBC’s The Sky at Night are indeed present within Joseph’s painting of the same name. Above and behind the block of flats the night sky, complete with twinkling stars, is clearly visible.

Another artist to document, or recall, the riots that had occurred at the other end of London, in Brixton, a week earlier than the riots sparked by the death of Cynthia Jarrett, was painter Kimathi Donkor. His Coldharbour Lane 1985 was painted some two decades after the events themselves (Figure 4). In Donkor’s painting, the essential elements of Joseph’s The Sky at Night – the brutalist and brutalizing housing, the battles and the attempts to repel the neighbourhood’s invaders – were present. As mentioned earlier, Groce’s maiming sparked rioting in the vicinity of Brixton, a region of south London. BBC News (‘Riots in Brixton after police shooting’, 1985) recalled that: Riots have broken out on the streets of south London after a woman was shot and seriously injured in a house search.

Armed officers raided a house in Brixton early this morning looking for a man in connection with a robbery.

Crowds began to gather outside the district’s police station when news broke the police had accidentally shot the man’s mother, Cherry Groce, in her bed with apparently no warning.

Local people had already been very critical of police tactics in Brixton and a mood of tension exploded into violence as night fell.

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Figure 4. Kimathi Donkor, Coldharbour Lane 1985, oil on canvas, 152 x 153 cm, 2005. # Kimathi Donkor.

Dozens of officers dressed in riot gear were injured as they were attacked by groups of mainly black youths with bricks and wooden stakes.32

As with pretty much all mainstream media coverage of rioting, one needs perhaps to be careful in processing such coverage. While reports of rioting routinely include tallies of police injured, no such consideration of physical frailty is generally extended to those members of the public caught up in disturbances not necessarily of their making. No tallies of injuries sustained by/inflicted on members of the public – either at the hands of rioters or at the hands of the police – are included in such reporting. In similar regard, we perhaps ought to be sceptical of the prospect of a timely and fortuitous availability of medieval-sounding ‘wooden stakes’.

Along with Railton Road, Coldharbour Lane had over the course of the middle to late twentieth century developed or acquired near-iconic status as one of the original ‘frontlines’, indicating the contested territory wherein the police and black youth regularly clashed or otherwise came into confrontational contact with each other. On a map, Coldharbour Lane is one of the main thoroughfares in South London leading southwestwards from Camberwell into Brixton. Although the road is over a mile long, with a mixture of residential, business and retail properties, the stretch of Coldharbour Lane depicted in Donkor’s painting centres on a few blocks, not too far from Brixton Market and nearby shops, bars and restaurants, where Coldharbour Lane meets Acre Lane in central Brixton.

Donkor’s painting recalls a time when Brixton was very much, and very much regarded as, a black (as in distinctly African-Caribbean) neighbourhood. True to the ‘frontline’ nature of Coldharbour Lane, Donkor’s painting shows three ghetto defenders, each in various stages of hurling rocks at the massed ranks of their tormentors, located outside the frame of the

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canvas some distance to the right of the depicted rock-throwers. In point of fact, we do not know for certain what the first rioter is about to hurl, as his hand/weapon are located beyond the left side of the artist’s canvas. Rock, half-brick, petrol bomb, whatever the weapon, the first rioter, and the one closest to us, is about to let it fly. As something of a dramatic backdrop to the group of three, there stands an anonymous housing block, its façade of muted colour effectively pock-marked by what seem to be impossibly small windows, making the building more reminiscent of a prison, or a low-rent Ministry of Truth33 building, rather than a building of homes in which Londoners are supposed to live.

Reminiscent of images of rock-throwing young Palestinians of the Intafada, some of Donkor’s urban warriors are at pains to mask their faces, to prevent subsequent identification by police photographers and surveillance cameras, and the judicial and extra-judicial retribution that would come with such identification. Only the face of the third figure is visible, though he nevertheless wears the traditional clothing of the disaffected ghetto dweller, the hoodie. Like The Sky at Night, Coldharbour Lane 1985 consciously avoids (re)creating a scene of bloodlust, wanton destruction and mayhem. And, like Joseph’s painting, Donkor’s, in its particularly restrained way, shows a small group of ghetto defenders, seeking to join righteous battle with the uniformed aggressors who have come into their midst and invaded black territory in the most brutal and rudest of ways.

Coldharbour Lane 1985 is characteristic of Donkor’s style of painting. He fearlessly tackles key, dramatic, monumental moments of African diaspora history, but does so with a painterly preciseness that borders on aesthetic frugality. Despite the animated scene depicted, Coldharbour Lane 1985 resonates with an almost deafening silence, almost as if the riot is taking place with the environmental volume turned right down or muted altogether. As such, the painting stands in marked and salutary contrast to the shrill, hysterical and sensationalist tones that normally accompany television reports of urban disturbances, reports that, by their nature, offer more in the way of heat than light, on the causes and anatomies of a riot.

Notes 1 As with a great many other riots, the riots that took place in certain English cities in the summer of 2011 were subject to all manner of theories by media pundits and others as to why they had happened. There was, however, one unavoidable truth: the riots started with a grievance, the central contributory factor being the shooting dead by armed police of Tottenham resident Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old black man, on August 4, 2011, in circumstances probably best described as unclear. Initially, rioting grew out of a palpable sense of frustration, on the part of certain people, because the community of Duggan’s friends, family and neighbours had been unable to secure from the police adequate or satisfactory responses to their respectful and reasonable demands for some sort of immediate explanation. The atmosphere of questioning and suspicion was perhaps needlessly stoked by the familiar release of untruths and misinformation in the immediate wake of Duggan’s death. Chief among these untruths was the claim, peddled by an obliging media, that Duggan was involved in some sort of shoot-out with the police.

Believing themselves to be stonewalled, the anger of Duggan’s community of friends, relations and neighbours turned to frustration, and out of this frustration grew random acts of destruction by certain individuals not necessarily connected with the spontaneous protest that erupted in the wake of Duggan’s shooting. These random acts of arson quickly spread first through Tottenham, then through other areas of the capital, then through other areas of the country. The shooting of Mark Duggan is apparently the subject of several formal investigations and, to date, no definitive explanation has been forthcoming.

2 I make mention of mainland Britain, to distinguish such rioting from that which has taken/which takes place in the cities of Northern Ireland, Belfast and Derry, in which predominantly younger people from both sides of the sectarian divide have done battle with the police of the province. Within Britain itself,

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towns in the north of England have periodically witnessed rioting by Asian youth. According to Dominic Casciani, community affairs reporter, BBC News website, ‘In the summer of 2001, a number of northern towns in England erupted in violent clashes predominantly sparked by racial tensions, mixed, to some extent, with orchestrated rivalries between criminal gangs. ‘Oldham, Burnley and Bradford experienced violence which saw hundreds of young Asian men (Pakistani and Bangladeshi) take to the streets.’ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5032166.stm (accessed May 25, 2012).

3 Mercer,: Welcome to the Jungle, 178.

4 Kettle and Hodges, Uprising!

5 Ibid., 10.

6 After the Riots: The Final Report of the Riots Communities and Victims Panel. The panel (whose members were Darra Singh OBE, Simon Marcus, Heather Rabbatts CBE and Maeve Sherlock OBE) released its report on March 28, 2012.

7 For more on John Martin, see http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/sep/08/john-martinpainting-the-apocalypse.

8 ‘Share the Riches’ appeared on several CDs by Jamaican reggae group Culture, including Culture: Chant Down Babylon, Crucial Roots Tunes, 1989–1999, Reggae Collectables label, 1999.

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9 Quoted in Sivanandan, A Different Hunger.

10 Linton Kwesi Johnson, ‘All Wi Doin is Defendin’, from Dread Beat an’ Blood, the first long-playing record of poetry released by this British, Jamaican-born poet, then styling himself ‘Poet and the Roots’ (Front Line Records/Virgin Records, released in 1978). According to Wikipedia, ‘Johnson was the first person to accurately describe the situation of the black British youth in the inner cities in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This theme runs through most of the songs on this and his other albums but it particularly evident in the last vocal song on the album ‘‘All Wi Doin’ Is Defendin’’’ which it is remarkably prescient as it foresees the Brixton riot (1981) in some detail and justifies it before it had even happened. All media commentators and politicians were shocked by this event. Not Linton Kwesi Johnson. Lyrics include ‘‘Send in the riot squad quick because we’re running wild’’ ‘‘All we need are bottles and bricks and sticks’’ and these were indeed the principal weapons used by the 1981 rioters. ‘‘All Wi Doin’ is Defendin’ so get ready for war!’’ for Johnson was correct in seeing the forthcoming riot as an essentially defensive act by the black youth of Brixton after years of victimisation by the police.’ http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dread_Beat_an%27_Blood (accessed June 4, 2012).

11 Linton Kwesi Johnson, ‘Bass Culture’, the title track of a long-playing record by Linton Kwesi Johnson (Island Records, 1980). In 1976, during the course of the annual Notting Hill Festival, violent street battles had erupted between black youth and the police in the vicinity of the carnival. But it was the rioting in St Paul’s, Bristol, in 1980 (plus major eruptions the following year in Brixton and elsewhere) that emphatically declared the arrival of the dissatisfied urban-dwelling ghetto youth. These were heady days. These years, the late 1970s and early 1980s, made up one of the most politically, culturally and racially charged periods of black British history.

12 Solomos and Black, Race, Politics and Social Change, 81–2.

13 ‘Riots in England: The fire this time/The worst rioting in decades will cost the country more than money’, The Economist, August 13, 2011, http://www.economist.com/node/21525945 (accessed May 27, 2012).

14 Though others have laid claim to it, the phrase is said to have originated with H. ‘Rap’ Brown, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) national director, who coined the phrase when race riots erupted in the mid-1960s. See Dierenfield, The Civil Rights Movement, 166.

15 ‘77’ written by Michael Dan, Barry Ford and Winston Bennett and performed by Merger on the longplaying record Exiles in a Babylon (Sun Star Muzik, 1977).

16 Sheridan, Soul Rebel, 44.

17 Donald Rodney in conversation with Lubaina Himid, State of the Art, Illuminations Films, Channel 4, 1986.

18 A number of writers have attempted to detail various aspects of the cultural, social, economic and political relations of reggae, both in Jamaica and abroad and, importantly, including recent developments in reggae dancehall (in which the political subtexts are no less powerfully present in both commercial and ‘slack’ as well as so-called ‘conscious’ exponents – if possibly more ambivalently with respect to contemporary conditions). See for example, Potash, Reggae, Rasta, Revolution; Partridge, Dub in Babylon; Foster, Roots Rock Reggae; Bradley, Bass Culture.

19 Compelling evidence of this exists in the form of An England Story: The Culture of the MC in the UK 1984– 2008, Soul Jazz Records, 2008.

20 Newsnight, August 12, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14513517 (accessed September 30, 2012).

21 One of the most celebrated songs on the album was ‘Slave Driver’, with its haunting music and pressing lyrics that located the plight of the Jamaican sufferer in the legacy of slavery: ‘Slave Driver, your table is turned. Catch a fire, you’re gonna get burned.’ .

22 The portrait of Marley, in profile, on the record’s back cover was from a photograph by Esther Anderson. The album design for Burnin’ was by Visualeyes.

23 http://www.bobmarleymagazine.com/2011/11/interview-with-tony-wright/ (accessed May 28, 2012).

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24 Substantial publications on black British artists’ practice remain something of a rarity, but see, for example, Piper, Relocating the Remains, and Rodney, Doublethink.

25 The Times, January 16, 1987, quoted in Institute of Race Relations, Policing against Black People, 26.

26 The scene of Cynthia Jarrett’s tragic death was memorably recreated by Kimathi Donkor, one of the artists discussed in this text, in his painting Madonna Metropolitan (2005, oil on linen, 152 x 152cm).

Madonna Metropolitan depicted a collapsed and dying Cynthia Jarrett, being attended to by one of her distressed daughters, while all around them police officers continued to turn the domestic room upside down, in their search for heaven knows what. For good measure, one of the officers aggressively remonstrates with the daughter, jabbing his finger menacingly in her direction, even while life drains from the heart attack victim.

27 For a discussion of these ‘riots’, see Rose, A Climate of Fear. For more on the Broadwater Farm riots, see Dabydeen, Gilmore and Jones, eds, The Oxford Companion to Black British Culture, 71–2.

28 Ibid.

29 ‘No Woman No Cry’, written by V. Ford, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Natty Dread, Island Records, 1974.

30 Tam Joseph was not the only artist interested in these fractured and fractious urban environments.

Mohamed Bourouissa, an Algerian-born photographer, has recently emerged as an image-maker whose locations draw heavily on la banlieue. Magali Jauffret, commenting on Bourouissa, noted that he was an artist ‘who has chosen to work on France’s ghetto-like suburbs’. Jauffret, ‘The Suburbs as Visual Object’.

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31 ‘Concrete Jungle’, written by Bob Marley, performed by the Wailers, Catch A Fire, Island Records, 1973.

32 http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/28/newsid_2540000/2540397.stm (accessed May 25, 2012).

33 The Ministry of Truth was where Winston Smith, the main character in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, worked. In the book, it is described as an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete rising some 300 metres into the air, containing in excess of 3000 rooms above ground level. To emphasize the sinister and terror-laden function of the Ministry of Truth, on the outside wall of the building there appeared three slogans of the Party: ‘WAR IS PEACE’, ‘FREEDOM IS SLAVERY’ and ‘IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH’.

Bibliography Bradley, Lloyd, Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001.

Dabydeen, David, John Gilmore and Cecily Jones, eds, The Oxford Companion to Black British Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Dierenfield, Bruce J., The Civil Rights Movement. Harlow: Pearson Education, 2004.

Foster, Chuck, Roots Rock Reggae: The Oral History of Reggae Music from Ska to Dancehall. Lakewood, NJ: BPI Communications, 1999.

Institute of Race Relations, Policing against Black People. London: IRR, 1987.

Jauffret, Magali, ’The Suburbs as Visual Object’, in Mohamed Bourouissa: Périphérique: ’The Suburbs as Visual Object’, Galerie municipale du chateau d’Eau, October 1, 2008.

Kettle, Martin and Lucy Hodges, Uprising! The Police, the People and the Riots in Britain’s Cities. London: Pan, 1982.

Mercer, Kobena, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies.

London and New York: Routledge, 1994.

Partridge, Christopher, Dub in Babylon: The Emergence and Influence of Dub Reggae in Jamaica and Britain in the 1970s. London: Equinox, 2010.

Piper, Keith, Relocating the Remains, London: INIVA, 1997.

Potash, Chris, Reggae, Rasta, Revolution: Jamaican Music from Ska to Dub. New York: Schirmer Books, 1997.

Rodney, Donald, Doublethink, London: Autograph, 2003.

Rose, David, Climate of Fear. London: Bloomsbury, 1992.

Sheridan, Maureen, Soul Rebel: The Stories Behind Every Bob Marley Song, 1962–1981.

New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999.

Sivanandan, A., A Different Hunger, London: Pluto Press, 1982.

Solomos, John and Les Black, Race, Politics and Social Change. London: Routledge, 1995.

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Eddie Chambers is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches classes and seminars on art history of the African Diaspora.

Chambers’ book Things Done Change: The Cultural Politics of Recent Black Artists in Britain (Rodopi Editions, Amsterdam and New York) appeared in 2012.

Reflecting Chambers’ interest in black-British artists, the book addresses recent developments in the profile of black-British artists, in an era in which British art has come to be dominated by the so-called yBa (young British artists) generation. In 2012 Chambers had an essay (An Inglan Story, An Inglan History) in the catalogue to accompany the autumn 2012 exhibition of one of the UK’s most important photographers of black Britain, Vanley Burke, at mac – Midland Arts Centre – in Birmingham. Chambers also had an essay (‘Who’d a Thought It?’) on the interplay between the work of Frida Kahlo and black-British artist Donald Rodney published in a recent issue of Wasafiri. His current book project is a history of black artists in Britain from the mid-20th Century onwards (I.B. Tauris, London). At the College Art Association in 2014, Eddie Chambers will be co-chairing a panel on ‘Visualizing the Riot’.