Caribbean and African migration made race central to postwar British politics and cultural studies

Evidence

As he notes, through the late 1970s and early 1980s, he continued to produce work on race, principally under the auspices of the UNESCO Division of Human Rights. At the same time, as he explains, if he had taken little explicit involvement in writing about the geographical Caribbean, nonetheless substantial parts of its population had evidently followed him to England, as migrants—and, in their wake, questions of race had become increasingly central to British politics. As he notes, CCCS had been involved in research projects on black crime and later “mugging,” starting in the early 1970s (see volume 1, chapters 12 and 13). Later, the CCCS Race and Politics Group, involving influential figures such as Paul Gilroy, Erroll Lawrence, Hazel V. Carby, and Pratibha Parmar, among others, produced the pathbreaking volume The Empire Strikes Back. This was central to the development of new theorizations of race, ethnicity, and diaspora, while later, in 1987, Paul Gilroy published his widely influential There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 30

Categorization

• XREF: Direct bridge to later Islamophobia readings: the CCCS Race and Politics Group and The Empire Strikes Back are foundational to race-and-ethnicity theory that Islamophobia literature builds on.