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I Black London THE CALIFORNIA WORLD HISTORY LIflRARY THE IMPERIAL METROPOLIS AND EditedbyEdmundBurkellLKennethpomeranz, DECOLONIZATION IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY and Patricia Seed Marc Matera UNNERSY OF OKLAHOMA L18RARS UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS CONTENTS University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by plsilanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions Por more information, visit List of Illustrations vii www.ucpress.edu. Acknowledgments ix University ofCalifornia Press List ofAhbreviations xv Oakland, California © zo15 by Tise Regents of the University of California Introduction: ‘The Imperial and Atlantic Horizons of Black London i Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Afro-metropolis: Black Political and Cultural Associations Matera, Marc, 5976— author. Black I.ondon: the imperial metropolis and decolonization in the in Interwar London a a twentieth century / Marc Matera. p. cm.—(The California world history library; zz) a Black Internationalisni and Empire in the 1930S 6a Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-520-18429.6 100 (cloth: alk. paper) 3 Black Feminist Internationalists ISBN 978-0-510-28430-2 (p5k. alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-52.0-95990-3 (ebook) Sounds of Black London 145 i. Blacks—England---.London—--Social conditions—loth century z. Postcolonialism—England—-London—--History—zoth century. 3. Black Masculinities and Interracial Sex at the Heart Decolonization—Great Britain—History—zoth century. I. Title. II. of the Empire i. 00 Series:76.9.B55M38California world history library; 2.2. DA6 ioi in 3o5.896’o411o9—dc2 6 • Black Intellectuals and the Development of Colonial Studies 2014035966 Britain 138 Manufactured in the United States ofAmerica Pan-Africa in London, Empire Films, and the Imperial Imagination a8o 2.4 2.3 2.2 2-1 2.0 ‘9 ,8 17 16 , 10 8 - 6 2 5 5 4 3 Epilogue 310 In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press ha printed this book on Natures Notes 32.7 Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements 0fANSI/NIsO z39.48—I991 (a 1997) (Permanence of Bibliography 379 Paper). Index 395 I the colonies as spaces ofrelative personal freedom for white FIVE rs havl depicted on nonnormative desires. The Colonial men, including the freedom to act office took steps to limit interracial relationships in the years before the war, between white men and “native” but as long as these liaisons involved sex Black Masculinities and Interracial Sex at women, they reaffirmed the racial order of the empire in the bedroom. The urban areas in the Heart ofthe Empire growth ofpredominately male black populations in the British and the fears it Isles, filliped by wartime arrivals, brought miscegenation conjured home to the metropole at a time when the popularity ofAmerican cultural imports, many ofwhich were connected to the United States’ large black minority, reached new heights. The sexual potency attributed to black anxieties over the state of men in much of this imagery only exacerbated2 white manhood provoked by the war experience. anxieties surfaced in the war’s immediate aftermath with the 1919 I ARGUE IN THE FOREGOING CHAPTERS that interaction in London ‘These and the public controversy over France’s use of North and West and intellectual and cultural exchange among people of African descent race riots in the occupation of the Rhineland. In both cases, commenta embedded within particular spaces ofsociality both mediated and facilitated African forces black men’s desire, even preference, for lighter-skinned women. the movement of news, ideas, texts, and people along intersecting imperial tots assumed London, and elsewhere, crowds of white rioters targeted mixed- and transatlantic circuits, generating expansive notions of black unity in In Liverpool, neighborhoods looting and terrorizing the homes of black Britons, not response to global political developments and a changing imperial system. race 3 The follow and Afro-Caribbeans but also Arabs and Asians. London, including many of the spaces examined in the preceding chapters, only Africans writing in Britain’s leading leftist newspaper, the Daily Herald, the offered new possibilities ofself-invention and love across the color line. Private ing year, of imperialism and secretary of the pacifist Union of life and social activities became another arena in which black men contested socialist critic D. Morel, who had earlier denounced torture and the limits placed on their existence and expressed their anticolonialism, how Democratic Control, E. in the Congo under Belgium’s King Leopold II, added his ever differently. Sex between black men and white women was far more com other atrocities in Germany over the presence ofMoroccan and Senegalese mon in Britain than in the colonies. Interracial relationships varied drasti voice to the outcry weeks that followed, women’s groups, representing trade cally, from ephemeral liaisons to lasting partnerships, but most male troops. In the feminist constituencies, and publications such as the intellectuals, artists, students, and activists from Africa and the Caribbean unionist, socialist, and Leader joined the campaign. During his keynote address at a large formed close ties with white women during their time in the city. This chapter Women’s demonstration organized by the Women’s International League for Peace considers the intimate as a particularly fraught and highly scrutinized scene 17, Morel raised the possibility of “wars ofextermina of self-fashioning and diasporic formation in the imperial metropolis.’ and Freedom on April two races,” spurred by “the militarised African, who has In the wake ofthe shattering effects ofWorld War Ion millions ofBritish tion between the white men in Europe, who has had sexual intercourse men and the simultaneous liberalization of gender roles, sensationalist press shot and bayoneted in Europe.” In a statement of support, Reverend John coverage and sexualized representations of blackness circulating in transat with white women and Aborigines’ Protection Society echoed this lantic popular culture fueled anxieties about the potential for and repercus Harris of the Anti-Slavery warning. Delegates to the 1910 meeting of the Trade Union Congress sions of “miscegenation.” The term miscegenation could connote interracial received copies ofMorel’s pamphlet The Horror on the Rhine, and the Labour sex, interracial marriage, or the mixed-race offspring of such relacionships Labour Party passed resolutions against the use of but commentators rarely distinguished between these different meanings. In Party and Independent Europe. The Jamaican writer Claude McKay, who spent a the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Britons usually associated African troops in little year in London after the war, was one of the few to challenge interracial sex with sexual libertinism in the colonies, and subsequent schol over a MASCULINITIE5 AND INTERRACIAL SE • zol zoo BLACK Morel’s paranoid fantasies of black male sexuality. After the Daily Britons and their fantasies of black sex. African Herali black men as to white with refused to publish his lengthy letter, it appeared in Sylvia Pankjiurst’s .mericans, Afro-Caribbeans, and West and East Africans often arrived Workers Dreadnought. “Why,’ Mc Kay asked, “all this obscene, on sex, monogamy, and how these were related to mas maniacal very different views outburst about the sex vitality of black men in a proletarian paper?” 5 respectability, and anticolonial politics, while most British-born Ye culinitY, later, he recalled, “My experience ofthe English convinced me that interracial relationships and grew tip in multieth prejudj blacks were the product of against Kwaine Nkrumah spent Negroes had become almost congenital among them. I think the niC enclaves. George Padmore, Ras Makonnen, and Anglo-Saxon mind becomes morbid when it turns on the sex life London, and a constant stream of colored years in the United States before moving to people.” The horror on the Rhine, which went through eight editions entertainers passed through the city by the of African American intellectuals and 192.1, larger campaign 8 parts of the African spring of and the that Morel spearheaded helped estab between the 19L0s and 1940S. Men from different the relative lish a pattern in which interracial sex signified as much a political as a moral diaspora discussed variations in racial taxonomies and debated 4 other obstacles to forging a threat. severity of racism in different locales, as well as the conversa Sexuality was the overdetermined context for the negotiation and per united front against empire. When considering these questions, relationships. The forinance of black masculinity at the heart of the empire. Britons and black tion frequently turned to the topic of sex and personal migrants alike often conceived of movement between the colonies and the prevalence of interracial relationships within the city’s small black commit Ralph Bunche merropole in sexual terms and specifically, given the skewed gender ratio nity surprised African American visitors. The social scientists 19305 late i940S, among the latter, in terms of sex between black men and white women. and St. Clair 1)rake, who visited London during the

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