Writing Black Scotland

WRITING BLACK SCOTLAND WRITING BLACK Series Edited by Maria-Daniella Dick, Scott Hames and Alex Thomson ‘Writing Black Scotland is a most needed intervention into twenty-first century understanding of Scottish literature through time, raising questions about ‘otherness’ and ‘othering’ as well as purposive colonialism, subjugation and exploitation. ENGAGEMENTS ENGAGEMENTS The book is lucid, compassionate, discriminating and admirably ENGAGEMENTS sensitive to discrete historical moments, illuminating and engaged at every level.’ Alan Riach, University of Glasgow A critical approach to blackness in devolutionary Scottish writing Writing Black Scotland examines race and racism in devolutionary Scottish literature, with a focus on the critical significance of blackness. The book reads blackness in Scottish writing from the 1970s to the early 2000s, a period of history defined by post-imperial adjustment. Critiquing a unifying Britishness at work in black British criticism, Jackson argues for the importance of black politics in Scottish writing, and for a literary registration of race and racism which signals a necessary negotiation for national Scotland both before and after 1997. JOSEPH H. JACKSON JOSEPH JOSEPH H. JACKSON is Assistant Professor in Twentieth- Century and Contemporary Literature in the School of English at the University of Nottingham. WRITING BLACK Cover image: Maud Sulter, Twa Blak Wimmin, 1997 the mag collection, UK © Estate of Maud Sulter. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2020. Image courtesy of Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow Cover design: www.paulsmithdesign.com SCOTLAND Race, Nation and the ISBN 978-1-4744-6144-3 Devolution of Black Britain edinburghuniversitypress.com JOSEPH H. JACKSON Writing Black Scotland Writing Black Scotland Race, Nation and the Devolution of Black Britain JOSEPH H. JACKSON Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting- edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Joseph H. Jackson, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Garamond by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 6144 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 6146 7 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 6147 4 (epub) The right of Joseph H. Jackson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Contents Acknowledgements vi Series Editors’ Preface viii On Blackness and Makars: What is a Black Scotland? 1 1 The Britishness of Black Britain 26 2 ‘You Got a White Voice’: Blackness in Devolutionary Scotland 55 3 The Black Jacobeans: Jackie Kay’s Trumpet 87 4 White Ethnographies: Luke Sutherland’s Jelly Roll 114 5 Mad as a Nation: Suhayl Saadi’s Psychoraag 144 Conclusion: Anchoring in 2020 173 Bibliography 188 Index 201 Acknowledgements Over the long period over which this book has reached some sort of maturity, I have accrued social and intellectual debts at a frenetic rate. The enthusiasm and kindness of Gail Low started me on this path at the University of Dundee. David Dabydeen and Michael Gardiner have overseen my development from a know-nothing to a know-something in black British studies and in Scottish literature respectively, and have exerted a greater shaping influence over my thinking than anyone else. Graeme Macdonald and Alan Riach engaged deeply and critically with my ideas. Scott Hames and Alex Thomson have provided me with peerless editor ial feedback and moral support. Michelle Houston and Ersev Ersoy at Edinburgh University Press have been wonderful, and Jane Burkowski has greatly helped me to improve the manuscript. I have a long list of extremely supportive friends and interlocutors. I’d like to say thanks to everyone, and in particular people who have either read my writing and offered generous and thoughtful feedback from its earliest stages, or helped me keep it together at various points: Yoon Sun Kyoung, Claire Westall, Máté Vince, Katie Vickers, Vicky Smith- Majdoub, Christian Smith, Adam Slavny, Andrea Selleri, Michael Morris, Siân Mitchell, Malachi McIntosh, Alice Leonard, Sam La Vedrine, Kirri Hill, Sorcha Gunne, Letizia Gramaglia, James Christie, Lucy Ball and the Very Hungry Caterpillars. The imprint of their friendship is everywhere in what follows. The institutional research leave I was granted in 2017–18 by the University of Nottingham allowed me to complete a great deal of writing, without which I would likely not have been able to finish the book. My colleagues at Nottingham have also provided a great deal of encour- agement and insight. I would like to thank particularly Nicola Royan, acknowledgements | vii Dominic Head, Pete Kirwan, and Sean Matthews, who have all read draft work, helping me to improve my writing and my reasoning, and Lynda Pratt for her mentoring and guidance. Special mention must go to Steven Morrison, a great friend to me, who has read every word twice over and given me some excellent ideas. My students have taught me too, from ‘Devolutionary British Fiction’ at Warwick to ‘Dependency Culture’, ‘Contemporary Fiction’ and ‘One and Unequal’ at Nottingham, and I’d like to say thanks to all of them, singling out Chris Griffin, Zara-Jane Apau and Chloe Ashbridge as those with whom I could talk about this project specifically. There may be mistakes, but without the advice and generosity of all these people, there would be far more. My friends in Nuneaton have kept me in good spirits. I have promised them I will start another book right away. They tell me they are already missing the composition of this one. Finally, to my family, whose constant support means I have never had far to fall, and to Carina, for absolutely everything else. Series Editors’ Preface After two decades of devolution in Scotland, where might the energies of critical intellectuals find purchase or engagement today? Critics celebrate a renewal of artistic and literary confidence; but the polarisation of constitutional debate often treats cultural production as a proxy for political identity. It is more urgent than ever to understand how the historical and contemporary construction of Scottish identities intersects with questions of race, gender and class: yet Scottish cultural studies are dispersed across conflicting traditions of ethnographic, sociological, historical and aesthetic enquiry. Despite repeated calls for more cosmopolitan perspectives, Scottish literary studies remain embedded in a conservative and belated approach to tradition: animated politically by the need to articulate a distinctive cultural identity, too often dependent on a limited set of historiographical frames, neglectful of broader critical and disciplinary contexts. The Engagements series aims to respond to the dynamism of recent cultural and political debate, without being bound by these familiar limits. We hope to publish work which analyses modern and contemporary Scottish literature, culture and society, drawing on interdisciplinary, transnational, comparative and theoretical frameworks. As we write, it seems certain that what the legal theorist Neil Walker has described as the UK’s ‘constitutional unsettlement’ will continue for another decade, attended by economic crisis and political struggle on cultural terrain. Some humanities scholars have argued for a move beyond critique. We disagree: Scotland’s past and present continue to demand critical analysis, the detachment of the scholar combined with the commitment of the activist. They call, we believe, for engagements. Edinburgh — Glasgow — Stirling 2020 On Blackness and Makars: What is a Black Scotland? What does it mean to speak of a ‘black Scotland’? One definition might draw on the significant presence of black people in Scottish history. In the sixteenth century, the Scottish Makar William Dunbar’s ‘Of Ane Blak- Moir’ is reputedly the first literary representation of a black Scottish woman, which suggests that black Scots lived and worked in the court of King James IV (1488–1513).1 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the era of plantation slavery, black people such as Joseph Knight were brought to Scotland as slaves, Robert Wedderburn and Mary Seacole were born from the Scottish diaspora in the Caribbean, and skilled workers like ‘Black’ Peter Burnet emigrated to Scotland from the United States.2 Frederick Douglass, who travelled extensively in Scotland campaigning against slavery, chose his own surname from Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake.3 Hugh MacDiarmid’s slogan, ‘Back to Dunbar!’, did not urge a retrospective of the black dialect poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, born to former slaves in Ohio in 1872, but the name that he shared with the early Makar stands as evidence of Scotland’s part in the genealogy of slave- holding in the Americas, or, in Hannah Lavery’s elegant formulation, ‘the Scotland beyond Scotland’.4 Gilbert Heron, the father of the American poet Gil Scott- Heron, was the first black football player to play for Celtic FC, one example among many: post- war black migration to Scotland is registered across public

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