By Max Farrar on December 1, 2022
Arthur France MBE is a hero of mine. He is a founder of Black Power in Leeds, of the Leeds West Indian Carnival and the New World Steel Orchestra.
I promised Arthur and Tattra France that I’d write his biography, and the only good thing about the Covid Pandemic was that it gave me the time to do it. About 20 hours of interviews with Arthur are its base, and it also offers the context in which Arthur made his life as a political, educational and cultural activist. There’s a lot of back ground material on the island of his birth (Nevis, adjacent to St Kitts) and much more on the Bad Mother Country he met when he arrived in England in 1957. It’s aimed at the ‘general reader’. Jargon free, and with lots of references for further reading, so (hopefully) useful for students. It’s one way into understanding some of the (sometimes violent) history of ‘race relations’ in the UK.
Here’s the information supplied by the publisher, the excellent Hansib: AI – Speaking Truth to Power – Hansib Or go straight to their website if you’d like a copy (295 pages with index). https://www.hansibpublications.com/epages/es147335.sf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=/Shops/es147335/Products/HP259
Posted in blog, books and edited collections, writing | Tagged Arthur France MBE, Black British History, Black Lives Matter, hidden from history, Leeds |
By Max Farrar on October 13, 2021
I’m a fan of Caryl Phillips‘s writing as a dramatist, novelist and essayist. Over the years we’ve become friends. I was asked by the premiere scholar of his work, BénédicteLedent, to write an essay about his novels for a special edition of a pukka literary journal concentrating on his work. I said I was no literary critic, but she liked my essay (on this site) about Don Bannister’s novels, so we went ahead. Reviewing each of his novels to date, I made the argument that — contra those who see his work as unremittingly gloomy — it always reveals shafts of hope. The pukka journal rejected my essay. But it came out some time later, updated to include some reflections on Caz’s latest work, A View of the Empire at Sunset (which provides a new interpretation of Jean Rhys). Here’s the PDF. Caryl Phillips Novels
Posted in blog, culture and politics, writing | Tagged Bénédicte Ledent, Caryl Phillips, hope, novels, politics |
By Max Farrar on April 6, 2021
This article joins the storm of criticism that greeted Dr Tony Sewell and his Commission’s report when it was published on 31.3.21. It makes some specific criticisms, but it provides a broader context than most of the responses I’ve read so far. Firstly, it aligns the Commission with the ‘culture war’ the current UK government is waging over Britain’s place in the world (and specifically its ‘success’ in responding to racism). Secondly, it shows the intellectual impoverishment of the Commission’s implied analysis of the causes of racism.
In writing for the general reader here, I’m trying to distill a lifetime of reading, writing and demonstrating in the field that sociologists used to called ‘race relations’.
The main article is here. (Quite a long read, about 4,000 words.)
Why Sewell’s 2021 Commission Report is so wrong
I am working with the #RememberOluwale charity on a project designed to transform visitors’ experience of the place in Leeds near where David Oluwale was hounded to his death by two Leeds policemen in 1969. This led me to think about how all ‘places’ could be transformed if we applied a full understanding of the causes of racism that are set out in the above article. So I’m uploading the chart I made here. It’s a quick read. All comments welcome.
Action PLan for Tranforming Place
Posted in blog, culture and politics, public sociology, writing | Tagged BlackLivesMatter, Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, culture wars, Dr Tony Sewell, racism |
By Max Farrar on May 6, 2020
Here are our memories of those heady days. I guess you’ve got to be about 70 and still infected with the Virus68 to be much bothered with this, but there are, thankfully, lots of younger people brimming with enthusiasm for radical social change, so please read on.
(Published by the journal Northern History.)
Immense thanks to
#ChristianHogsbjerg for putting all this together and for the great intro, analysing to the 1968 Leeds University Union sit-in, and reminding us of the nefarious
#JackStraw
Posted in blog, culture and politics |
Arthur France MBE is a hero of mine. He is a founder of Black Power in Leeds, of the Leeds West Indian Carnival and the New World Steel Orchestra.
