2) - Nassy Brown, Jacqueline 1998. "Black Liverpool, Black America, and The Gendering of Diasporic Space

Black Liverpool, Black America, and
the Gendering of Diasporic Space

Jacqueline Nassy Brown
University of California, Santa Cruz
Afraid is a country with no exit visas.

—Audre Lorde, "Diaspora"
If the paper seems preoccupied with the diaspora experience and its narratives of
displacement, it is worth remembering that all discourse is "placed," and the heart
has its reasons.
—Stuart Hall, Cultural Identity and Diaspora
The terms black Liverpool and black America, no less than the African diaspora,
refer to racialized geographies of the imagination. The mapping of racial signi-
fiers onto geographical ones lends such terms the illusion of referring to physi-
cal rather than social locations. That there is no actual space that one could call
"the African diaspora," despite how commonly it is mapped onto particular lo-
cales, points attention to the ways that social spaces are constructed in tandem
with processes of racial formation.
Inspired by Paul Gilroy's first book, There Ain't No Black in the Union
Jack: The Cultural Politics ofRace and Nation (1987), I set out in 1991 to study
the meanings and practices surrounding "race" and nation in Liverpool, Eng-
land. Set in a city with one of the longest-settled black populations in the United
Kingdom, my research investigated why and how black identity is constituted as
the mutual opposite of English and British identities. Yet in pursuing these
themes, I became increasingly amazed at how frequently my informants would
make discursive forays into "black America." Nested at key moments in their
narratives were references to the formative influence that black America—in
many forms—has had on racial identity and politics in their city. The experi-
ences they narrated were varied, and the narratives themselves were rich, poignant,
and deeply gendered. Black Liverpudlians told of their relations with the black
American servicemen (or "GIs") who were stationed outside their city for some
25 years following World War II.1 Men and women also spoke about the travels
of their own African, Afro-Caribbean, and native black Liverpudlian fathers
who were employed as seamen by Liverpool shipping companies. The global
wanderings of the city's black men often brought them to black Atlantic ports of
Cultural Anthropology I3(3):29I-325. Copyright © 1998, American Anthropological Association.
291
292 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
call—many in the United States. Narratives of black Liverpudlians' diasporic

encounters also referred to the emigration of local women to the mythical place
called "black America." Finally, and crucially, men and women told of how and
why they have accessed the many black American cultural productions that
have, for decades, circulated around the social space of black Liverpool.
These diasporic experiences—and black Liverpudlians' narrations of
them—are the subject of this article. I focus on the politically, culturally, and
sexually intimate relationship that unfolded between black Liverpool and black
America over two historical moments: the postwar period and the era defined by
the U.S. civil rights and Black Power movements. In so doing, I highlight the
particularly "black" character of American hegemony, showing how this nas-
cent phenomenon actually facilitated the development of radical blackness in
Liverpool. Yet this is not to constitute black Liverpool as some kind of inert re-
ceptacle of global flows of black American culture. Nor do I use "the local" to
denote hermetically sealed, bounded communities. Instead I follow James Fer-
guson and Akhil Gupta, who argue that "notions of locality or community refer
both to a demarcated physical space and to clusters of interaction. . . . [T]he
identity of a place emerges by the intersection of its specific involvement in a
system of hierarchically organized spaces with its cultural construction as a
community or locality" (1992:8, emphasis in original). More specifically, I aim
to show that "the local" constitutes a racial and spatial formation of community
of premier importance for black Liverpudlians, one that forcefully mediates and
sanctions appropriations of black America. I argue that local gender ideolo-
gies—and gendered ideologies about locality—have effectively produced black
Liverpool and black America as social spaces to be differently occupied, expe-
rienced, bridged, and traversed.
The case of black Liverpool presents a rich opportunity to invert premises
that have long undergirded the study of diaspora, as well as those that have
gained attention recently. A brief critical analysis of those premises is followed
by a discussion of the birth of Liverpool's black community, focusing on the de-
velopment of two key categories of identity: "local" and "black." The sub-
sequent section presents people's narratives on the ways social relations in what
has become "black Liverpool" have produced contradictory gender positionings
vis-a-vis black America.
Geographies of Diaspora Theory

The most common, and indeed foundational, tendency in the study of dias-
pora is to define it quite simply as any population that lives outside of the place
thought to be its original homeland. A painfully cursory survey might suffice to
illustrate the point. James Clifford begins a recent review article on diasporas by
posing the following question: "How do diaspora discourses represent experi-
ences of displacement, of constructing homes away from homes?" (Clifford
1994:302). In a similar vein, Basch et alia say quite definitively that "to see one-
self in a diaspora is to imagine oneself as being outside a territory, part of a popu-
lation exiled from a homeland" (Basch et al. 1994:269, emphasis added).
BLACK LIVERPOOL, BLACK AMERICA 293
Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg have recently defined diaspora as "the dou-
bled relationship or dual loyalty that migrants, exiles, and refugees have to
places—their connections to the space they currently occupy and their continu-
ing involvement 'back home' " (Lavie and Swedenburg 1996:14).
This reliance on a "homeland/new land" binary has produced a second, also
highly common, tendency, which is to define diaspora through one and only one
sensibility: a feeling of displacement. In the above-quoted query, Clifford ex-
plicitly equates having "a home away from home" with displacement. Lavie and
Swedenburg do the same, also explicitly, in the very title of their recent edited
volume, Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity (1996). Basch et
alia also state plainly that displacement is absolutely axiomatic of the phenome-
non. Diasporics are completely defined by their longings for home; they are peo-
ple positively pining for a past rooted in some other place. In the words of Basch
et alia, "Diasporas are populations that, while dispersed across boundaries and
borders, salvage from their common loss and distance from home their identity
and unity as 'a people' . . . " (Basch et al. 1994:269, emphasis added). It is not
my intention to suggest that migrants do not long for home or do not feel dis-
placed. I want simply to point to the fact that, despite the growth of an exciting
literature on diaspora in the last ten years or so, there is a steadfast reliance on a
staid set of premises that constitute feelings of loss and displacement from one's
distant homeland and ancestral culture as the only kind of diasporic subjectivity
and desire. The merits of individual works within this body of scholarship not-
withstanding, these approaches generally take an initial moment of disper-
sal—or "scattering," as per the Greek etymology of the term diaspora—to be the
starting point of analysis, rather than examining how historically-positioned
subjects identify both the relevant events in transnational community formation
and the geographies implicated in that process.
Black British cultural critic Paul Gilroy's intervention is to analyze black
culture and identity in a diasporic framework in which all roads do not point
back to Africa. His two major books, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack
(1987) and The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993a),
have been of singular importance in rejuvenating scholarly interest in the dias-
pora concept (see Clifford 1994; Winant and Omi 1993). For this reason they de-
serve close, if brief, examination for both the possibilities and the limitations
they offer.
Gilroy's approach grows out of a thorough critique of "nation," particu-
larly what he characterizes as the "ethnic absolutism" of both white British and
black cultural nationalist discourses on culture and community.2 The first of his
many weighty pronouncements on the limits of "nation" occurs in the introduc-
tion to There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack, where he confesses to being
"weary of having to deal with the effects of striving to analyse culture within
neat, homogeneous national units" (1987:12). He goes on to argue, with consid-
erable force and subtlety, that the "language of nation" is racialized to its core,
operating through a wholly biologized notion of culture, and then proceeds to
declare that this language is inappropriate for Britain's black movements
(1987:68). He also states that the emphasis on nationhood obscures the salience
of local and regional identities, which often contest and fracture English identity
and sometimes welcome black membership (Gilroy 1987:54). In a similar, if
more crucial vein, Gilroy presents the plurality of diaspora culture as the anti-
dote to the putatively homogeneous nation. In order to argue for its importance
to the practice and analysis of black political movements, Gilroy must show how
diasporic identity transcends the ahistorical terms in which racial and national
identities get constructed. Toward these ends, he offers this insightful example:
Black Britons' connection to black South Africans is based on neither a primary
affiliation to Africa, romantic visions of a homogeneous African culture, nor
shared Africanness; on the contrary, it is quite particular, deriving from "a com-
mon experience of powerlessness" understood in racial categories (Gilroy
1987:158), and giving rise to what Ralph Ellison calls an "identity of passions"
(Ellison 1964:263, quoted in Gilroy 1987:159). Although Gilroy does not pur-
sue this illustration further in There Airit No Black, the point may profitably be
considered one of the cornerstones of his approach to diaspora—an approach
that is more fully elaborated in The Black Atlantic, where he again cites Ellison's
suggestion that blacks worldwide are connected by an identity of passions
(1993a: 111). The passages that follow, from Gilroy's first book, introduce two
other foundational premises:
Black Britain defines itself crucially as part of a diaspora. Its unique cultures draw
inspiration from those developed by black populations elsewhere. In particular,
the culture and politics of black America and the Caribbean have become the raw
materials for creative processes which redefine what it means to be black, adapting
it to distinctively British experiences and meanings. [1987:154]
The social movements which have sprung up in different parts of the world as evi-
dence of African dispersal, imperialism and colonialism have done more than ap-
peal to blacks everywhere in a language which could invite their universal
identification.. .. They have communicated directly to blacks and their support-
ers all over the world asking for concrete help and solidarity in the creation of or-
ganizational forms adequate to the pursuit of emancipation, justice and
citizenship, internationally as well as within national frameworks. [1987:156]
Gilroy's originality is marked in the first instance by the simple choice of

referent for the word elsewhere, for it does not signify Africa, but particular
places where African descendants live. He argues that black communities are
linked transnationally by the mutual perception of a shared, wholly racialized
condition and through the cultural and political resources they make available
for overcoming the racial oppression that grips them all, albeit in different ways.
With this he productively moves beyond analyses that fixate on the mere fact of
migration—and on the displacement from, and reverence for, ancestral home-
lands often assumed to follow from that event.3 The foregoing passages reveal
two other important premises: that the quest for "emancipation, justice, and citi-
zenship" characterizes black diasporic political culture, and that the national and
transnational dimensions of black British life and politics are linked, although
it remains important to distinguish their domains and effects. I would argue that
the contentious aspects of Gilroy's approach lie not in these premises, per se, but
in the ways he chooses to apply them. The effect of these choices is that There
Ain't No Black avoids discussion of power asymmetries within national black
communities, while The Black Atlantic does not attend to relations of power ex-
tant across them.
Gilroy forcefully resists the hegemony of the nation, yet he is very careful
to allow for some of its continuing salience. As he remarks wryly in another con-
text, "I am not against the nation . . . we have to put it somewhere" (Gilroy
1993b:72). But in his considerable revamping of diaspora, the national operates,
rather selectively, under the sign of specificity, while the transnational operates
under the sign of universality and political affinity across national difference. In
this way, the national reverts to its traditional role, permitting an understanding
of specifically black British experiences and meanings. Likewise, in his sugges-
tion that "unique" black British cultures are being created based on particularly
British "experiences and meanings," two phenomena he works so hard to pull
apart—nation and culture—again get collapsed. Meanwhile, he lauds black
American cultural productions for proving eminently useful and translatable in
other national contexts, as evident in the fact that black Britons have so produc-
tively appropriated them in fashioning their own, again distinctive, racial iden-
tities. Together, these moves effectively grant one black population the luxury
of particularity, while endowing the other with the burden of universality. Black
American cultural products that make the journey across the Atlantic must in-
vite universal participation even though they may actually spring from specifi-
cally American "experiences and meanings" that do not translate well. As I
elaborate below, this tension makes exceedingly difficult the realization of the
project Gilroy identifies in The Black Atlantic: to locate common ground within
the transnational.
In The Black Atlantic, Gilroy calls for a more geographically-expansive un-
derstanding of black political culture. The aforementioned premise concerning
justice, emancipation, and citizenship, first announced in There Airi t No Black,
seems to have busted through the seams of that text, as evidenced by the richness
and length of the diaspora chapter. So it returns, slightly amended, as the driving
force of The Black Atlantic, a social space formed in the first instance by the
hemispheric—not national—racial order inaugurated by slavery, and thereafter
by blacks' constant movements through and engagements with multiple geogra-
phies in their search for freedom, citizenship, and autonomy. This ongoing
search, Gilroy argues, constitutes the link between black cultures across differ-
ent times and spaces. If his first book emphasizes the influence of black America
on black Britain, his second is premised on a strategic reversal. The Black Atlan-
tic unearths data on the profound influence that European thought had upon
Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright, and W. E. B, Du Bois. Gilroy presents
compelling evidence of the black American tendency to discount as racially im-
pure both these European sources and the works inspired by them, such as Du
Bois's Dark Princess (1974). He argues convincingly that the international travels
of these and other black American artists and intellectuals fundamentally

shaped their lives and works—which nevertheless get studied, he justifiably
protests, in the inexcusably provincial, national frame of black American par-
ticularism.4 Cornel West, Nelson George, and Quincy Jones are implicated here.
Gilroy indicts black American cultural historians and critics for promoting cul-
tural or ethnic exclusivity in a way that allows black Americans to claim owner-
ship of resources that are only partially, as Gilroy says, their "ethnic property."
The phrase cleverly recalls the black British critique of capitalism in There Ain't
No Black, except that the relations of ownership to be resisted now are those that
promote pure and authentic black cultures and identities. Although The Black
Atlantic abounds with examples of ethnic absolutism in the writing of diaspora
culture and history, it is a later work that shows Gilroy positively reveling in his
ability to provide a counterexample of how that culture and history should be
documented and analyzed. Noting the influence of the English comic actor
Benny Hill on the former hip-hop star Luther Campbell, Gilroy writes,
The contribution that Hill's gurning techniques or anglo-vernacular characters

like Ernie the milkman may have made to the multiplicity, impurity and hybridity
that is Hip hop surely provides the last nail in the coffin of ethnocentric accounts
of its origin and development.... Squeamish "insiderist" criticism cannot... ac-
cept the catholic tastes of the creators of the form whose loyalty to the phattest
beats usually exceeds their commitment to imaginary racial purity and phenotypi-
cally coded musical production. [1994:51-52]
He adopts an especially vehement tone to condemn such instances of ethnic ab-

solutism, seemingly because they prevent the black public sphere from func-
tioning as a conduit of intercultural exchange of raw materials that are them-
selves hybrid in origin and, consequently, from inviting universal belonging and
participation—particularly from Europe. To state it more pointedly, ethnic ab-
solutism marginalizes black Britons and other black Europeans from what their
American counterparts myopically constitute as "real" blackness. Invoking Du
Bois to great effect, Gilroy poignantly conveys the gravity of these identity poli-
tics in the very first sentence of The Black Atlantic: "Striving to be both Euro-
pean and Black requires some specific forms of double consciousness"
(1993a:l).
Despite the obvious appeal of a hybrid, though unifying, transnational cul-
ture that could invite belonging among blacks everywhere, merely celebrating
the ideal without attending to the power relations that thwart its realization in-
vites a familiar brand of policing—one similar to the nationalist projects that
Gilroy himself deplores. Any cultural practices or products that are not deemed
useful or translatable, and hence do not invite universal participation across na-
tional divides, become suspect. Gilroy's recent observation about the place of
basketball in African American culture is only the most interesting example. He
observes that whereas black America once offered the rest of the black world a
powerful discourse on freedom, now that world is inundated with "morbid phe-
nomena like the Americo-centric image of the black public sphere as the inner-
city basketball court" (Gilroy 1994:56). This "poetic topography of race and
place," he notes importantly, "has no equivalent in Britain's Black cultures"
(Gilroy 1994:57). There can scarcely be a doubt that some antagonistic relation-
ship to black America is being articulated here; if only it were specified, ana-
lyzed, and explained, the entire diaspora project, both in terms of cultural theory
and political practice, might benefit.
We might begin by asking how particular black communities outside of the
United States are affected by the global dominance of American culture. Britain
is surely more inundated with things American than the reverse. Add to this the
considerable nationalism that underpins American society generally and what
results is the kind of "Americo-centrism" among U.S. blacks that concerns Gil-
roy. A jointly political and theoretical dilemma arises precisely here, for his
analysis does not invite inquiry into the way American hegemony has deter-
mined the lopsided nature of transatlantic exchanges, forging as a result rela-
tions of antagonism among blacks transnationally. That is, these tensions have
surfaced even though American hegemony may be credited with providing the
very means for black identity to become such a formidable political force in
other national contexts. It is worth resurrecting the term cultural imperialism to
examine the dynamics and dilemmas of identity in black communities on the
margins of "the African diaspora."5 It is only in so doing that we can pose this
question: when does the unrelenting presence of black America actually become
oppressive, even as it inspires?6
Analogous, if not symbiotically related, power asymmetries may be identi-
fied in the ways black American cultural products are differently absorbed,
translated, and utilized within the individual black European communities into
which they travel. In There Ain't No Black, Gilroy analyzes the creativity of
black British uses of black American and Caribbean "raw materials" as a cri-
tique of capitalism. Here he provides an important corrective to the assumption
that all black politics are directed at racism. But this analytical turn effectively
diverts attention from the thunderous critique of ethnic absolutism that precedes
the rich and lengthy chapter on diaspora. To wit, Gilroy does such a masterful
job of showing the limits of black America's diasporic vision in his second book
that one may look back at his first study and wonder why he did not perform a
similar operation on black Britain. It is worth asking what kinds of ideologies of
culture and community—ethnically absolutist or otherwise—work within par-
ticular racial communities to determine how they process the raw materials they
access. How do local black communities draw upon those ever so crucial and
contested concepts of nation, ethnicity, and culture to distinguish and mark ma-
terials originating locally and elsewhere, assigning them meaning and signifi-
cance accordingly?
The gendered character of this particular process of classification, as well
as of the broader process of fashioning black American raw materials into local
black cultures and identities, represents still other questions central to this kind
of investigation. It is precisely issues of gender, class, and sexuality—as these
form the terrain for local negotiations of power—that often split the category
black, providing people with quite different motivations for seeking affirmation
from blacks elsewhere. A serious elision in Gilroy's work, then, concerns the
possibility that actors may assign mutually contradictory meanings to the black
cultural productions they appropriate. Diaspora may very well constitute an
identity of passions; but these passions, and the means of pursuing them, may
not be identical within particular black communities. These points force the so-
ber realization that, despite invitations to universal identification, not everyone
partakes in the privileges of membership to the diasporic community with impu-
nity.
Although Gilroy's two books are integrally linked, it is in the analytical
space between them that we find the greatest possibility to understand the poli-
tics of diasporic desire that animate Gilroy's totally worthy, if decontextualized,
critique of black American particularism. Broadly speaking, There Aint No
Black and The Black Atlantic are distinguished by the simple fact that the first
studies the formation of black culture within a national context and the second
studies it across national contexts. Gilroy acknowledges the importance of ana-
lyzing black culture in both national and transnational frames, noting that "both
dimensions have to be examined and the contradictions and continuities which
exist between them must be brought out" (Gilroy 1987:156). Yet the questions
his work prompts are even more complicated than this. He leaves us to explore
how power differentials extant across black communities might mediate power
relations within them. The inverse also merits interrogation: how do power rela-
tions within the diasporic space of particular black communities determine par-
ticipation in the transnational space of diaspora that Gilroy calls the black Atlan-
tic?
For the purposes of exploring the power-laden symbiosis between the
"within" and "across" of diaspora, I will analyze those practices in which black
people in Liverpool make use of any of the vast resources of what they construct
as the black world, yet within the political economy of what has been available
to them. Diasporic resources may include not just cultural productions such as
music, but also people and places, as well as iconography, ideas, and ideologies
associated with them. "Place" is an especially important resource, for the prac-
tice and politics of travel serve to map diasporic space, helping to define its mar-
gins and centers, while also crucially determining who is empowered to go
where, when, under what conditions, and for what purposes. I use the term dias-
poric resources, then, to capture the sense that black Liverpudlians actively ap-
propriate particular aspects of "black America" for particular reasons, to meet
particular needs—but do so within limits, within and against power asymme-
tries, and with political consequences.
Setting Sail: The Birth of Liverpool's Black Community

When black Liverpudlians narrate their history, three themes often
emerge.7 The first concerns the participation of black men in the city's shipping
industry; the second concerns the birth of the black population—a process nar-
rated with special reference to the prevalence of interracial marriage in Liverpool:
and the third concerns the transformation of their racial identity from "half-
caste" to "black." These related processes, to be examined briefly below, have
given rise to the contemporary form of black Liverpudlians' local and racial
identities.
Situated in England's northwest, Liverpool owes its birth and growth as a
city to its preeminent role as an imperial seaport. Providing easy access to Africa
and the Americas, the city was a slave port of major significance. At the height
of its powers, Liverpool controlled 60 percent of the British slave trade (Fryer
1984). Even after Britain legally abolished the trade in 1807, Liverpool's ship-
ping industry continued to thrive because it facilitated trade among the various
colonial economies Britain controlled. During the 19th century and well into the
20th, African (and to a lesser extent, Afro-Caribbean) men were hired as seamen
by Liverpool shippers (Tabili 1994).
Although there are other migration histories that account for the black pres-
ence in that city, the dominant narrative centers on these African seamen, whom
black Liverpudlians commonly represented as the founding fathers of what has
become the black community.8 In no small way, black men and women of the
city claim their rights to local identity through reference to black men's partici-
pation in what is constituted (again, by men and women alike) as a Liverpudlian
tradition: seafaring. In addition to the employment it provided black men, this
tradition also formed a very gendered basis of local identity. One black seafarer
I knew, a 40-year-old man born in the city, here explains why he became a sea-
man, naturalizing the occupation through his genealogy: "Me mum's father
originated in Africa—he went away to sea. All her brothers went away to sea. So
all the males in the family that I know of all went away to sea at one point. So for
me that was just a natural thing to do." In addition to the seafaring background
of his family, his entire environment served as an enticement. He recalled,
The house where we used to live in Upper Warwick Street was next door to an Af-
rican social club. So even people going in there I knew were going away to sea as
well, on the African ships. We used to call them "the palm boats." It's a nickname
for any ships going to Africa and bringing oils and all the rest of it back. So, even
then, I knew I'd be going away to sea, and everything revolved around that, really.
The Ewings provide another example of a family that defines itself through
seafaring. Clara Ewing, a black woman in her sixties, was born in the city, as
were her parents (who were also black). In one interview, I asked her son why he
went away to sea. He responded simply, "I wanted to travel." His mother imme-
diately chimed in to revise his answer: "Because my father (his granddad) did it.
His father did it. His grandfather on the other side did it. His great-grandfather
did it. It's a seafaring family, you see? As I say, in Liverpool [they] were all sea-
farers, weren't they?" Like Clara, people often spoke glowingly of the seafaring
activities of the men in their families and what these activities afforded them.
These men's contributions were especially important during the wartime
and postwar periods. Scott, a black man in his sixties, had childhood memories
of these times. He noted that even though "we won the war," rationing of meat
and bread went on for years after hostilities ended. If it were not for ships com-
ing in from Africa and the Caribbean, he said, they would not have had fruit for
years. Despite the poverty, by many people's account, black people in Liverpool
had an active social life, some of which centered on the rituals that celebrated
seamen's comings and goings. Scott's vivid narrative recalls the nostalgic feel-
ing evoked by others, even older than him:
During the war, [as regards] the type of parties and music we used to have, almost
every black family, regardless of how poor they were, there would always be
someone in that family who could play some kind of musical instrument—mainly
guitars. When it came to people mixing, the club life didn't exist. Community cen-
ters didn't exist. When someone's uncle or father would come home from sea, you
couldn't go to the pubs, so they'd arrange a party that would be mainly of an Afri-
can style. There'd be yams, and there'd be fruit....
As the very basis of local identity, the seafaring tradition is implicated in

the gendered construction of travel, for black Liverpudlian narratives credit sea-
men forgiving birth to the black community itself. The implications of studying
such a profoundly male preserve beg brief consideration here. Stefan Helmreich
(1993) has objected to Gilroy's celebratory treatment of seafaring as one of the
concrete means through which noncontiguous places were enjoined, facilitating
in turn the production of a transnational black culture. What follows is Gilroy's
explanation for his choice of the ship as a metaphor in The Black Atlantic:
I have settled on the image of ships in motion across the spaces between Europe,
America, Africa, and the Caribbean as a central organizing symbol.... The image
of the ship—a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion—is espe-
cially important for historical and theoretical reasons.... Ships immediately fo-
cus attention on the middle passage, on the various projects for redemptive return
to an African homeland, on the circulation of ideas and activists as well as the
movement of key cultural and political artefacts: tracts, books, gramophone re-
cords and choirs. [1993a:4]
Helmreich objects, arguing that this domain is too uniformly male to foster an
understanding of women's agency in producing the black Atlantic. He writes,
"[Gilroy's] examples of how the unity of the black Atlantic is constituted . . .
privilege a set of experiences historically inaccessible to women. The trans-
atlantic experience on ships was available only to those politically and economi-
cally positioned in a male-dominated sphere" (1993:245). 9 James Clifford offers a
similar critique of male-centered diaspora discourses:
Diasporic experiences are always gendered. But there is a tendency for theoretical
accounts of diasporas and diaspora cultures to hide this fact, to talk of travel and
displacement in unmarked ways, thus normalizing male experiences. . . . Retain-
ing focus on specific histories of displacement and dwelling keeps the ambivalent
politics of diaspora in view. Women's experiences are particularly revealing.
[1994:313]
Echoing Helmreich, Clifford goes on to note thatGilroy's black Atlantic history

"leans toward the diasporic practices of men" (1994:325).
These well-intentioned critiques notwithstanding, I would urge diaspora
studies to attend more directly to the politics of gender rather than to "women's
experiences"; that is, the asymmetries of power called "gender" are what consti-
tute and normalize masculinity and femininity as categories of "difference,"
producing in turn "women's experiences" (Scott 1992). Hence, rather than rei-
fying women's experiences and practices in the name of gender balance in dias-
pora studies, we should interrogate how particular practices (such as travel) and
processes (such as diasporic community formation) come to be infused with
gender ideologies (or become "gendered"), and how such gendering effectively
determines the different positionalities men and women can occupy. 10 Toward
these ends, I argue that it is precisely because seafaring is so staunchly male that
it forms such a fertile object of inquiry. Ethnographically speaking, it would be
a grave error to minimize the effects of seafaring in a place like Liverpool. 11
More pointedly still, an examination of the culturally constructed meanings of
seafaring would reveal the formation of a decidedly gendered politic of staying,
going, and returning. This approach therefore problematizes the critiques of
Helmreich and Clifford, which implicitly conflate the politics of travel and ac-
tual travel. As the testimony of Clara Ewing has already suggested, the agency
of women is evident in the ways they participate in making gendered inscrip-
tions about seafaring. Studied from the vantage point of the port, then, seafaring
provides a window on the centrality of gender ideologies to the production of di-
asporic space.12
African seamen, as has been suggested, are heralded in Liverpool for essen-
tially giving birth to the black community. Yet they are also noted for setting an-
other phenomenon into motion: the institution of interracial marriage. The
prevalence of interracial marriage is a crucial theme in narratives on local his-
tory. During their careers at sea, African men commonly docked in Liverpool's
port, formed romantic relationships with local women, mostly white, and later
married them, had children, retired from seafaring, and settled in the city—so
the dominant narrative goes, both in social scientific and local discourse. Diane
Frost's recent explanation is exemplary of the former. She writes,
Transient work patterns that derive from the nature of seafaring . . . led to short-
term relationships with local women. Permanent and long-standing relationships
with local women through marriage (formal or common-law) usually occurred
when these seamen became permanently domiciled in Liverpool or in some cases
this became a reason for gaining domicile. [ 1995-96:511
Several black Liverpudlians told me of a much earlier study of this phe-

nomenon. Published in 1930, it was written by an anthropologist named Muriel
Fletcher and given the revealing title Report on an Investigation into the Colour
Problem in Uverpool and Other Ports (Fletcher 1930). Mark Christian marks
the publication of "the Fletcher Report" as the dawn of philanthropic racism in
Liverpool because it expressed "concern" both for the "morally degenerate"
white women who consorted with African seamen, and for their haplessly patho-
logical "half-caste" children (1995-96). The sexualized interpretation of seafar-
ing lends specificity to the racialization not only of interracial unions, but also
of the children born of them.
Major and minor publications on blacks in Liverpool always condemn the
Fletcher Report for essentially developing a non-category ("neither black nor
white") to speak of blacks of mixed racial parentage.13 Their struggles to over-
come that inscription is an absolutely central theme in black Liverpudlian ac-
counts of the way they became black. While some blacks of mixed parentage
specifically cite black American influences on the rise of a black identity in Liv-
erpool, the blacks I knew with two black parents tended to boast that "we were
always 'black' in our family"—speaking somewhat disparagingly, perhaps, of
those who took longer to claim that identity. Yet the narratives of black Liver-
pudlians of mixed parentage reveal the difficulty of that process, for these Liver-
pudlians indicated rather painfully that their African fathers, whom they said
they looked to for racial identity, often perceived their children as racially dif-
ferent than themselves. Blacks of mixed parentage in Liverpool commonly re-
ported that their African fathers referred to them as "half-caste." While this is
not the place to historicize the term, we must grant the obvious possibility that
West African societies colonized by the British were heavily influenced by Vic-
torian constructions of "race" that were characterized by a concern for "purity"
(Lorimer 1978). African informants in Liverpool reported that they, too, grew
up with the term, and never recognized it as derogatory. A relatively recent im-
migrant to England explained, "Growing up in Nigeria, it was acceptable to call
people of mixed race 'half-caste' because to a lot of Nigerians it was not an abu-
sive term. It was purely a biological description of somebody who comes from a
mixed race."
Another important theme in local discourse on the black presence in Liver-
pool calls attention to the absence of marriageable black women in Liverpool in
the early years of African settlement.14 And when the numbers of black women
did begin to rise, their locally-born male counterparts did not consider them po-
tential spouses. Black men I knew reported that they had grown up with these
same women, concentrated as they all were into a few streets in the city's south
end. Black men felt a degree of familial intimacy with black women that pre-
cluded the formation of any sexual desire for them. Another common narrative
on interracial marriage, this one also articulated by black men, argues that it is
an expression of "freedom of choice."15 Although some blacks I knew observed
that this generations-old practice is now on the decline, interracial marriage,
which in Liverpool consists most visibly of black men and white women, is still
very prevalent. Although no statistics are available, it is fair to say that at least
half of the black population of Liverpool is of mixed racial parentage.16 Most
black Liverpudlians whom I knew had white mothers and black fathers (either
African, Afro-Caribbean, or black Liverpudlian).17
To give life to the debates on locaj and diasporic community formation, I shall,
in the remainder of this article, draw heavily on the words of black Liverpudlians
whom I knew, essentially putting their narratives into conversation with each
other, therein allowing the bases of commonality and contestation to emerge.
With this strategy, I hope to reveal people's highly mediated representations of
the past, focusing attention on the ways their own positioning vis-a-vis the ra-
cialized politics of gender, sexuality, and locality have shaped their desires vis-
a-vis black America.18 The ethnography is structured, also strategically, to show
these desires unfolding through time, across two critical moments in the forma-
tion of black identity in Liverpool. The older voices represented here belong to
blacks in their fifties and sixties who were born and bred in Liverpool, and who
were young adults during the wartime and postwar periods. The younger voices
belong to the next generation, people in their thirties and forties who were just
coming of age when the U.S. civil rights and Black Power movements began
"reverberating" around Liverpool, as one informant put it.
Black Americans Drop Anchor
World War II, as has been intimated, was a formative moment in Liverpool.
The city was heavily bombed and many of its men, black and white, were killed
on the high seas. Moreover, the war created dire economic circumstances with
which Liverpudlians had to cope. Also, very importantly, the end of the war saw
the rapid acceleration of U.S. global hegemony (West 1993). This hegemony
would carry through not only the postwar era but into the next, when black
American freedom movements would manifest palpably on the streets of Liverpool.
In a previous section, 60-something-year-old Scott noted that the global
travels of black seamen during the war gave the local community access to food-
stuffs unavailable in the rest of Britain. Yet it was not only food that the seamen
brought into Liverpool, but music. The generation preceding Scott's was able to
enjoy Billie Holiday and Lena Home recordings because, as Scott relayed,
In some instances, fathers and uncles had been over to America as seamen, and
had brought records back. So within the black community of Liverpool, we've
always grown up with a type of traditional black music. If it wasn't African, it
would be American—it wouldn't be so much West Indian, Caribbean music
around at that time.
Scott's discussion of this social life that centers on music begins to reveal the be-
lief that, although there are distinctions to be made between styles named as Af-
rican, American, and Caribbean, they all intermingle and distinguish themselves
from styles classified as white, and account for Liverpool's rise as a musical
center. "White people," he said, "found the black community of Liverpool, mu-
sically, so interesting because it wasn't the white Victor Sylvester, it wasn't the
white Harry James music. When they came into the black community they were
able to hear a mixture of music." As will be elaborated below, the local seamen's
contribution would soon be superseded by the offerings made by another group
of black men: American GIs.
Into the impoverished, yet lively, wartime environs entered American ser-
vicemen, black and white, who were stationed at bases across Britain; Liverpool
was sandwiched between two of them. One base, called Sealand, was 30 miles
south of the city, and the other, Burtonwood, was even closer, due north—just
short of Manchester. Scott described the social scene in the mid-1950s which
was created in part by the presence of these men, whom my informants com-
monly referred to as either "the Yanks" or "the GIs":
By that time, we had our own community centers as well as nightclubs. But the ac-
tual nightclub scene was fantastic. The black American GIs—'cause that's what
they were called—would come in with their big cars. Some of them were regular
servicemen . . . [but] some, in comparison to British servicemen or to the black
population, were quite rich. So they could afford to have their cars shipped over
from the States. And they would drive into Liverpool with these American Cadil-
lacs. Some of them would be in their uniforms, and some of them would be in their
American-style, civilian clothes. And they'd come into the nightclubs.... You'd
have a bit of a dance floor, and everybody would come in and enjoy themselves.... It
was the first time that you'd hear the likes of the Platters, and a lot of the old black
groups that are dying out now.
An important site in the cultural geography of blackness in the city, across

generations, was a place called the Rialto. It consisted of a ballroom that ex-
cluded blacks and a cinema that did admit them. A popular nightspot in Scott's
youth, it was burned to the ground during a major "race riot" in 1981. Yet the Ri-
alto featured prominently in happier black Liverpudlian memory. It was in ref-
erence to the Rialto that another informant, a black man in his thirties, made con-
nections like Scott's that draw distinctions between white and black cultural
production. Here he speaks of his mother, a white woman who sang black
American jazz at the Rialto Ballroom prior to the arrival of the GIs: "Before I
was born, my mother and her friends used to sing Billie Holiday, and that. They
were heavily into that music. So when the GIs came, it was like the real thing.
Like these were the people whose culture it really was."
Although they were stationed in England, the GIs had complete access to
music from home, which they shared with their "host community" and which
added to the city's already growing status as the cutting edge of black music.
White musicians were displaced, and the black section of Liverpool began to
draw the attention of neighboring areas for its booming musical life. Indeed,
some of my older informants strenuously argued that the Beatles "pinched" their
musical ideas, and some say actual songs, from the music they heard in the black
clubs of Liverpool in the late 1950s.
The nostalgia of some of the city's black men, across generations, revealed
an unwavering reverence of black America for its musical contributions to black
Liverpool. However, another common theme in black men's responses to the
presence of black America in the city concerned its embodied form—that is, the
presence of black American people as opposed to just music. Black Liver-
pudlian men critiqued the GIs for their apparent wealth. Scott described the mo-
nied image these men struck: "The high-ranking ones drove big Pontiacs. It was
the first time I had seen these cars apart from seeing them in American films.
And you'd see one of the GIs walking down Upper Parliament Street with
conked hair, and he'd be flashing his wallet and sweet-talking the women."
Some black men of the city joined white British men in commenting on the poli-
tics of location, saying that "there's nothing wrong with the GIs except that
they're overpaid, oversexed, and over here."19 Black women of this era had a dif-
ferent opinion. Invariably, black women who spoke of "the Yanks" and their ap-
peal referred to the good times the GIs gave them. What follows is the descrip-
tion Claire, a woman in her fifties, provided of the postwar dating scene:
We always looked forward to the weekend because Friday to Sunday, around the
Rialto area, it was packed with men with either blue uniforms or brown uniforms.
At Burtonwood Club they all had the brown uniforms on. And at the Sealand Club,
they were Air Force, so they all had the blue uniforms on. So there was this color
of brown uniforms and blue uniforms, and we would be looking for stripes. If they
had no stripes, they wouldn't get a looking. One stripe, you didn't get a looking.
You had to have two stripes and over before we would entertain them.
At this point I asked Claire what the black men of Liverpool had to say about all
this, and here is her response:
Well, there was a fight! The black men said that the Americans—"the Yanks" is
what they said—the Yanks were taking away our women. So there was a fight.
They beat each other up! They beat each other up terrible. But the women stayed
firm and said, "We don't want homegrown." When the Rialto was a cinema, they'd
come and pick us up and sometimes they'd have a c a r . . . . Well! And it'd be an
American car. And if you got one—an American man who had a car—oh, you
were a star! And they'd take you to the Rialto. Or, if they didn't have a car, just to
be seen walking up the road and going into the Rialto with this man, in this uni-
form, was something you knew that people were looking [at] and nudging one an-
other, and we just thought it was wonderful! When you go up the stairs to the
Rialto, they would put their hand on your elbow and help you up, and we just
thought that was marvelous! Now we did not get that attention from the blacks in
Liverpool. So after we had experienced these wonderful manners, this is what we
wanted. We wanted to be treated like we were queens. And we were getting that
treatment from the Yanks. And that's why we didn't want anything to do with the
men of the area.
Here Claire gives evidence that supports the view that black Liverpudlian men
commonly articulated, so it may be important to keep in mind her references to
the glamour of the black Americans, with all their stripes and their cars. That is,
she intimates that Liverpool's black women were attracted to the American men
for what they could offer. Yet Claire also notes, importantly, that women were
not getting that kind of attention from "homegrown" black men. 20
Two sisters of the World War II generation, Caroline and Jean, were in their
absolute glory reminiscing about these days. Caroline showed me her photo al-
bum, crammed with pictures of herself, Jean, and their various American beaus.
At one point in this interview, Caroline nudged her sister, asking with a gleam in
her eye, "We had some good times, didn't we [Jean]?" Her sister responded with
equal enthusiasm: "Oh, honest to God!" Their private, though telling, little ex-
change suggested that they were calling up some rather racy memories indeed.
In the memories they did verbalize, the GIs' presence was represented as key to
the making of Liverpool, even if these men were a tad unsophisticated. As
Caroline commented,
Liverpool used to be a smashing place! All the smart ones got out. The GIs used to
come in from Sealand and Burtonwood. Most of them were into partying here and
partying there. But they were nice, you know?! They spoke nice. You know—they
had the accent! They were good company—that is, every now and again you'd get
one that you could converse with!
Caroline and Jean are the daughters of a white Irish mother and a Nigerian
father—"a Yoruba man," as Caroline would proudly phrase it. Her photo album
was crammed with pictures of him, too. Caroline particularly enjoyed pointing
out his dignified poses and how he was dressed: in stunning English attire. Part
of what she loved about him—and indeed about the generation of African sea-
men to which he belonged—was the way he traversed two cultural worlds with
seeming ease. He would dress fashionably English, expressing no sense of con-
tradiction, yet also took pride in teaching his English-born children to cook Ni-
gerian food. The sisters' representations of their father and his compatriots con-
trasted dramatically with those of younger black Liverpudlians whose relations
with their own African fathers were fraught with tension. In speaking about their
father's identity, these women added another very important dimension to the
unfolding drama of 1950s Liverpool, for here they had occasion to condemn the
black Americans for speaking so disparagingly of Africans. Caroline recalled,
"One of them asked me—now I'm going back a long way—he asked me where
my father was from and I said, 'My dad's African.' And do you know what that
man said? 'Oh, one of them jungle men.' I said [to him], 'You don't know what
you are! You're only government issue!' " She and Jean added that when they
would go to the cinema with the Americans, these men would make racist com-
ments about the Africans depicted occasionally on the screen. The sisters ex-
plained the Americans' unsavory behavior in sociological terms, through refer-
ence to their class backgrounds. Caroline supposed that in comparison to her
own father, who was a chief chef on board a ship, most of the GIs came from
poor backgrounds. She speculated that it was only through their employment in
the services that they came to have "a few dollars in their pockets," as she put it.
Just as black American men would descend upon the Rialto area on the
weekends, so too would black women travel to the American bases on Liverpool's
outskirts to attend dances and meet men. Kathleen, in her fifties, explained:
The two American bases were within commuting distance; it would take an hour
and a half to get there on the bus. And the buses would be at Lime Street Station
and they'd pick up the girls and go to these dances, which is how a lot of the ro-
mances got started, including my own. Black men in Britain—and these were the
homegrown ones—were not into us "half-castes," as we were called in those days.
They were only interested in the white girls. The Americans came in and they were
interested in anyone in skirts, basically.21
As indicated earlier, interracial relationships in Liverpool have been com-

posed most visibly of black men with white women. Many black women I inter-
viewed expressed intense emotion when talking about the practice of interracial
dating. Although they often struggled to find some charitable explanation for
black men's behavior toward them, inevitably they would talk about the pain of
their perceived rejection. Another woman's attempt at explanation follows. It
bears note that her commentary about men was totally unsolicited. Here Crystal
was in the midst of comparing Britain to the United States on the matter of af-
firmative action policies, and was concluding that the latter was far ahead of her
own country in regard to this and other race matters. She proceeded to make the
following comment in a tone revealing both confusion and pain:
The black British culture is different than the American black culture. There's a
problem here because—this is going to cause so much of a problem, but it's
true—if you talk to black ladies in Liverpool, they'll say to you, "The black men
in Liverpool never seem to want to date us." I know a lot of black men in this com-
munity, and they do not date black women. And that's why when the men from
America—the black men—came from the base, it was like, "Hey, thank you!" And
we are so proud to be asked out by a black man. When I go to America, I'm asked
out by a black man, never white guys. Here I am always asked out by white men.
It's a crying shame. It really is. Maybe it's because you go to school together, you
grow up together, and you don't want to date each other. If I'm looking for a partner, I
know it won't happen in Liverpool! I asked my brothers why and they couldn't an-
swer me. They have never dated a black woman. They say it's a personal choice. I
think that's why black women marry Americans and go and live in America.
Here we may begin to see that it is exclusionary racial practices occurring

within the category black, along distinctly gendered lines, that send some black
Liverpudlians down the diasporic path. Black women's responses to their per-
petual exclusion from local black male desire sparked the joyful reminiscences
that Claire, Caroline, and Jean shared. Indeed, many black Liverpudlian women,
including Crystal, married Americans and migrated to the United States.
Together, the perceived class differences between black Americans and
Liverpool blacks, and the controversial dating practices among Liverpool's
black men and women, gave rise to a now institutionalized debate of the classic
chicken-and-egg variety. Black women said they were perpetually overlooked
by black men, while the latter commonly recited the refrain that "the Yanks stole
our women." The older generation of men—that is, those who were young
adults in the 1950s—say that they did not have fancy cars, that they were poor
and skinny from having lived off of rations for years, and that they could not of-
fer black women what "the Yanks" were offering. There grew, then, some ani-
mosity between black American men and Liverpool's black men that would ex-
tend into the next generation.
As the postwar years gave way to the period marked by the U.S. civil rights
movement, new images of black America were ushered into Liverpool. These
images contrasted sharply with the image that the black American servicemen,
themselves products of an earlier era in the formation of racial identity, had hith-
erto embodied. Caroline and Jean can perhaps best indicate the transformation
that took place across generations. Caroline said that "when all this American
civil rights happened in the sixties, the GIs changed their tune. They all wanted
to be 'black African' and that kind of thing. It's like today some of these people
are wearing African things and it's all like a fashion to them, you see." Jean
added, "They haven't got a clue about Africans and the different tribes, and that.
After the civil rights started . . . they all wanted to be dressed in the caftan or
whatever, with the big Afros." Like Jean and Caroline, black people com-
monly—and proudly— represent Liverpool as a distinctly "African" city, a
place where most people know their ancestors' exact origins on the continent,
even if they have been in Liverpool "for generations and generations," as they
often say. As further testimony to how "African" Liverpool is, people often
noted that many of the nightclubs in the black part of town, past and present,
have borne African names, such as the Sierra Leone Club, the Nigerian Club,
and the Igbo. In leaving this generation and proceeding into the next, it should
be noted that Caroline and Jean were the only two people I interviewed who
commented on the perceived lack of African identity as it concerned the black
Americans of the 1950s and early 1960s. The next generation of black Liver-
pudlians had much more to say about the positioning of the black Americans vis-
a-vis "Africa."
But before examining this new phase of diasporic identity politics, and the
class, gender, and sexual tensions at their core, it bears note that by the early
1970s, Liverpool's shipping industry began dying a slow death. By the end of
that decade it would come to a grinding halt, and with it, black men's traditional
livelihood. It became increasingly difficult for black men to get work traveling
around the globe.22 Yet a new trend in black Liverpudlian travel had begun to at-
tract attention: black women were boarding airplanes in droves, leaving Liver-
pool with their American husbands.
Civil Rights and Black Power in This "Very African" City

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the imaginations of young black Liver-
pudlians were captured by the resistance practices they commonly associated
with black America. They seized and appropriated the wealth of diasporic re-
sources available to them, imbuing all manner of iconography and cultural pro-
ductions emanating from black America with a racial meaning and significance
that could be productively utilized in the local context. Black youth fashioned
these materials, in all their variety, into a distinctly—and distinctly gen-
dered—black Liverpudlian politic. For example, this generation of black men
adopted the strategies of the Black Panthers in defying British fascist groups
who sought to restrict them from traveling into exclusively white areas of the
city. One black man I knew spoke, of such practices in an interview that took
place just outside of Liverpool 8, which is, strictly speaking, a postal designation,
but which takes on its cultural significance as the section of the city where
blacks are perceived to live in the largest numbers:
You wouldn't want to be in this area in them days because you'd be at risk. At my
age—then I was in my teens—you were at risk of being beaten up by the police or
the skinheads. And where I was was the heart of it, where these guys lived and
hung out. This was their homeland, not mine. It's funny—up by Lodge Lane
there's a pub called "the Boundary." And it actually was the boundary for black
people as far as I was concerned. You actually couldn't go down there and down
by Wavertree Road; it was like South Africa. Cops would actually say, "What are
you doing going out of your area?" We didn't like it, but.... The black commu-
nity was [in] Liverpool 8, Granby Street, Carter Street. To go into town meant
hand-to-hand combat. And also around then—you're talking about the late sixties
and early seventies—you were not only being around black people and a black
family, but also the Black Panthers.... We were reflecting what was going on in
the States. I mean we weren't actually—some of the older people were politically
motivated. But we just—we couldn't see why we couldn't go here, there, and the
other place. So we organized.
Others spoke of similar contributions black America made to their racial

sensibilities. Joseph, another black informant in his thirties, described how he
appropriated what I am calling diasporic resources to help him cope with grow-
ing up in an all-white part of Liverpool. He recalled that black American music
during the civil rights era was always "reverberating around the house." Joseph
said that he gained a perspective on racism by studying the lyrics of the Tempta-
tions—lyrics he described as "pure philosophy"—and by reading the backs of
their album covers. He added that as a child, he idolized Muhammad Ali for the
pride he showed in black people and for his rejection of what Joseph described
as "mainstream, white-dominated, American values." With that, Joseph said
that if whites in his neighborhood were calling him a "nigger," he was proud to
be that because, as he put it, "There are some powerful niggers in the world.
Look at Muhammad Ali." In the quotation below, Greg, another black informant
in his thirties, gives further testimony to the variety of diasporic resources that
people of his generation appropriated from black America. In so doing, he also
articulates a process of diasporic identity formation that mirrors that of other
black youth I interviewed in Liverpool. He recalled his struggle to understand
the racism of his schoolmates—a challenge confounded by his parents' inability
to respond to his troubles. His comments followed from his discussion of a song
that was sung in school when he was a young boy. The refrain contained the
word coon, which Greg said his white classmates particularly enjoyed singing:
I definitely became aware of being non-British, non-white. I can't say I became

aware of being "black" because I was too small to have a political context in my
head. I became aware of new things, new words that were designed to either in-
timidate me or put me under pressure from peers, from students, other people, and
from teachers to a certain extent.
Because I'm from a mixed background—my father's Nigerian, my mother's
white—you had separate answers to questions anyway. My dad deals with coloni-
alism in Nigeria and his thinking was that "they're all crazy, they're all mad,
they're white—they're all crazy." I'm supposed to just dismiss these things on that
basis and rise above it because my dad had the whole traditional cultural back-
ground firmed up and established, so his answer was just to ignore it. It still left the
question. Going toward me mum, me mum's usually quite angry about it, and dealt
with it on an immediate level. She'd say, "Well, you say this and you say that." But
it still left the questions. It was all coming out of me not being the same as the ma-
jority in the school. I'm aware that the majority of the school is British and Liver-
pudlian on a white basis, and aware that I definitely wasn't in that area. I wasn't
quite sure of the area I was in. I wasn't fully positioned in any position.
By the time I went to secondary school, I was definitely seeing myself as black;
there was a political context to how I was looking at myself. That was informed by
international things: Afros, style and fashion, my sisters' contact with the Ameri-
can air base, and things like that. It brought politics on a wider scale than just im-
mediately in Liverpool 8. Yeah, it informed things! It was in an international
context that I was starting to get feedback on things. Youth in the area were taking
on things. Growing Afros, wearing arm bands, wearing one black glove to a cer-
tain extent. I was brought out of this sort of West African upbringing where they
put you in a bubble. I could set my own agenda. It opened up things and my iden-
tity was, like, being informed by wider things, rather than just being informed by
the family.
Importantly, Greg noted the futility of looking to his parents for answers.
People of his age and also of mixed parentage said that "race" was not generally
discussed in their households. Unlike blacks of the previous generation,
younger ones often perceived their African fathers as gatekeepers, explaining
that their fathers steadfastly refused to share with them any aspects of African
culture as they knew it. As embodied in their relationships with their fathers,
these blacks' experiences of "Africa" were tinged with the pain of exclusion.
Greg said his father "wanted to keep bits of his self and not necessarily share
them with English people—which we were really perceived as. I mean English
mixed-race Nigerian-British people." Ronni, who is Greg's age and also of
mixed parentage, said she wanted to learn Yoruba, but claimed that her father
"seemed to want to put her off it." She movingly offered her understanding of
her father's position:
To be honest, I don't know if he was a bit prejudiced against his own daughters be-
cause of our color. I think he was a bit disappointed because, like, three of us were
very light (not me, I was one of the darker ones), and they seemed to get a lot of
pressure.... He was a funny man, mentally. His mentality was different, like.
Sometimes he'd go on, "Oh you don't know what them white people done to my
father," and all this. And he'd take it out on us. These African men—these old ones
what come from back home—they have some heavy mentality that is very difficult
to understand. You don't know if they love you or they hate you. Your own flesh
and blood.
Black Liverpudlians' pained relation to "Africa" coexists with their pride in

how "African" their city is. This difficult tension between pain and pride renders
their displacement from "Africa" all the more specific and stark. That is, the sen-
sibilities Greg and Ronni expressed above do not index desires and longings for
Africa as a generalized and idealized ancestral homeland, but rather betray a
profound sense of displacement from their African fathers. It was in this context
that "black America" became the object of diasporic longing, for it answered
these and other problematics—however partially and contentiously.
Black American iconography and ideologies traveling into Liverpool
helped some black youth grapple with issues of both racial identity in the face of
white British nationalism, and cultural identity in the face of what they per-
ceived as their African fathers' distancing posture. In what follows, Greg sug-
gests that through the gripping, and mutually class-based and masculine, image
these men embodied, black Americans effectively rerouted the previously fruit-
less search for an African identity among people of his generation. He does so by
describing the way the GIs, with their trappings of glamour and wealth, ever so
visibly occupied Granby Street—the symbolic heart of black Liverpool.
The American bases would accommodate a particular type of American black cul-
ture. They would accommodate it in style and fashion and big cars. The thing
about poverty in Liverpool—you didn't see big cars. You see them now, but [then]
you didn't see big cars and flashy clothes. And although you didn't fully under-
stand what was going on, you actually did get a vibe from it: a serious uplifting
feeling from seeing someone with black skin in a huge car driving down Granby
Street! And that opened up other areas, like the creme de la creme of the whole
dancing culture within black people. So you picked up on that level as well. There
wasn't a lot of connection to Africa other than via America. There wasn't that di-
rect connection. There is that massive connection within the large West African
settlement in Liverpool, [but] at that time it really wasn't an African agenda; it was
an American agenda and you got your information on Africa via America.
It would be tempting to read young black Liverpudlians' interest in Africa, even

though inspired by black America, as expressive of a romantic reverence for an
ancestral culture. A better way of accounting for it may lie in the authority the
GIs—and "black America" more generally—had already gained in Liverpool,
for the resources they provided proved eminently useful and translatable in local
struggles around "race." But the phenomenon can be explained even further by
elaborating the transformations in black Liverpudlians' class status across gen-
erations.
Significant changes were afoot in the ways blacks were being positioned by
their city's political-economic structure, as the death of the shipping industry
left the younger generation few job prospects.23 For this reason, it is worth com-
paring the different class positionings of black Americans and black Liver-
pudlians over the two historical moments under investigation, for these seem to
bear directly on the discrepant ways the two generations of Liverpudlians inter-
pret the Americans' authority on Africa. It will be remembered that Caroline,
speaking from the World War II generation, made an explanatory link between
the GIs' lower class status and their perceived lack of African identity; she ob-
served that these men denigrated Africans because they were too poor to know
any better. A similar, though inverted, set of class relations between American
and Liverpudlian blacks may now be operating in Greg's generation, which, as I
have already noted, has been shaped by the Black Power era. It may be conjectured
that the rising rate of black unemployment that accompanied the decline of Liv-
erpool's shipping industry lent the GIs, and their apparent wealth, even more
prestige in Greg's generation than in Caroline's. In her generation, as Scott re-
layed in his own narrative about the 1950s, cars signified America's affluence
relative to Britain; in Greg's 1970s version, these same flashy accoutrements
were reconstituted as signifiers of black possibility. The black American men
who would drive these spectacles down the now impoverished streets of Liver-
pool became entrusted with an unprecedented authority on Africa. And in con-
trast to Caroline and Jean, who remarked upon the hollowness of the GIs' Afri-
can identification in the civil rights and Black Power eras ("They haven't a clue
about Africans and the different t r i b e s . . . . It's all like a fashion to them"), Greg
drew on the GIs as a valuable resource ("You got your information of Africa via
America"). In expressing their awe of the GIs, people of his generation com-
monly catalogued which images associated with black America left indelible
impressions on them—images like the Afro, which people commonly assigned
an "African" significance. Displaced by their African fathers, young black
Liverpudlians accepted the invitation to universal belonging being issued from
black American quarters. But mutually imbricated ideologies of gender and lo-
cality—ideologies profoundly mediated by changes in black Liverpudlians'
class positioning—were also being transformed in the process, giving rise to a
set of sanctions that would sharply circumscribe the ways blacks could appropri-
ate diasporic resources.
Despite the fact that young black Liverpudlian men and women have
shared the same pained relation to "Africa," as embodied in their relations to
their fathers, their common retreat to "black America" has actually resulted in
the fracturing of local identity along distinctly gendered lines. Note the role
Greg attributes to black women in the fallout between the black Liverpudlian
and American men of the late 1960s and early 1970s:
There was definitely a thing that, it's hard to generalize it too much, but Liverpool
black women were definitely interested in American men more so than Liverpool
black men, really. Now the knock-on effect was that Liverpool black men resented
that, obviously, and tended not to mix so much with the American black men, re-
ally. That didn't stop the information coming through on a cultural basis about
black identity. That wasn't hindering that.
A similarly gendered view and experience of black America was articulated by

other men of Greg's generation who tended to trivialize women's attraction to
the GIs, projecting onto women what seemed to be their own attraction to the
Yanks' manifest blackness. Another man put it this way:
All the GIs were coming into the funk clubs. They had long coats and double-knit
jumpers [sweaters! that you couldn't buy in England at the time, big Afro combs,
and things like Jet Magazine and Afro Sheen. And local girls wouldn't go out with
local black guys 'cause we were just scum. And their idea was [that] if they mar-
ried a GI, they'd get back to the States where it was all happening.
Women's representations of their attraction to the GIs differed consider-

ably. Karen, who married a GI, moved to the United States, and eventually
moved back to Liverpool, described in quite different terms why black America
appealed to her in that era. Karen made some of the same references to black
American culture and thwarted African identity as did the men previously
quoted. But she draws on black America to position her racial identity within a
feminist framework that challenges oppressive African and "homegrown" black
narratives concerning local black womanhood. Unlike Joseph and Greg, Karen
constructs black identity with scant reference to white domination:
My consciousness . . . came from the black movement in the States. At the Olym-
pic games, when those guys put their hands up in the air, it was a source of pride
for me as a black person. And because of the problems with Africans and what they
termed us as, "half-caste" (the products of mixed marriages), I affiliated black
Americans as being more kin to me than Africa. I joined the black women's libera-
tion group and I joined the Angela Davis march in this country, and was very po-
litical in my sense as a black person. Anything that emanated from there—from
music to culture—was part of my culture!
In one forceful sweep, Karen critiques the pathologized category half-caste and
chooses black America as her culture—and indeed, her "kin"—over the ancestral
Africa with its problematic premises regarding racial birth.24 But the betrayal
does not stop there; it is also the cherished seafaring history that she scorns. She
spoke of the gendering of Liverpudlian blackness in equally forceful terms:
A woman like me was marginalized because I was seen as a feminist. A couple of

black men were good on the issue, but very few. So you would get that sort of com-
mentary like, "Oh, they're all chasing after the American dream" and, "They
didn't want to know us." Black men in the city said it was a historic thing about
white women; they say it was since the days when sailors came into town, and they
actually had relationships with white women because there were no black women
here. What happened when there were black women here?! They still didn't want
to know black women. The hurtful things that actually happened to black women
here meant you could go after "the American dream" thing and feel some respect
for yourself as a black woman.
Karen critiques local black men for invoking the proud seafaring narra-
tive—the basis of Liverpudlian identity itself—to condone a contentious aspect
of racialized sexual politics in the present day. Karen here suggests that the
manufacture of seafaring as an invented tradition has compelled black Liver-
pudlian women to access black America as a counterhegemonic diasporic re-
source, one which they can draw upon to feel some respect for themselves—as
black women. Black Liverpudlian men's idealized constructions of black Amer-
ica notwithstanding, the American Dream for Karen did not have much to do
with flash and glamour, or class mobility. For Karen and other women who in-
dicted Liverpool's racial-sexual politics, black America represented a resource
for attaining a form of self-respect which was, according to them, unavailable
locally. In this context, it bears remembering Crystal's observation about what
she and other black Liverpudlian women gained from the black American pres-
ence in Liverpool. She said, "We are so proud to be asked out by a black man"
(emphasis added). Lest it be understood that it was only as women that Crystal
and Karen appropriated black America, it bears emphasis that they also spoke to
black America's contributions to the more general causes of antiracism and
black empowerment. Crystal's narrative, quoted earlier, followed her (un-
quoted) discussion of the advances black Americans have made in the struggle
for affirmative action in the United States. Likewise, Karen made a laudatory
reference to the two black American athletes who, at the 1968 Olympics, put
their gloved fists in the air in support of the struggle for black liberation. Yet
Crystal's and Karen's specific references to "pride" and "self-respect" went fur-
ther, revealing the gendered and sexualized nature of the radical blackness they
fashioned out of black American raw materials.
The narratives presented thus far show that diasporic subjectivity among
black Liverpudlians was produced through a set of gendered antagonisms that
mutually implicated Africa, black America, and black Liverpool, rendering
each, in its own way, a highly contested resource for racial identity formation.
These narratives illustrate how the racialized politics of kinship and desire have
informed the construction of different categories of men (African, "home-
grown," and American). Collectively, then, the ethnographic material and
analyses presented here directly challenge contemporary theory, first, by com-
plicating the place of "longing" in the formation of diasporas, and second, by
problematizing the assumption that migration and "displacement" have been
key to the formation of diasporic community and subjectivity in Liverpool. That
is, in this case, migration did not result in diasporic longings; diasporic longings
resulted in migration. This insight helps recontextualize Stuart Hall's sentiment,
quoted in the epigraph and worth quoting again: "If the paper seems preoccupied
with the diaspora experience and its narratives of displacement, it is worth re-
membering that all discourse is 'placed,' and the heart has its reasons"
(1990:223). An insight that Arjun Appadurai proffers about the cultural politics
of diaspora can be similarly reframed, if we dare to allow the ancestral tropes he
implicitly invokes to refer us not to Africa, but to Liverpool: "The politics of de-
sire and imagination are always in contest with the politics of heritage and nos-
talgia" (Appadurai 1989:iii). In their appropriations of black America, black
Liverpudlian women effectively contested both the hegemony of Liverpool as
homeland and the rigidly racialized forms of desire and kinship that, some say,
constitute its black heritage.
Black Liverpudlian narratives on community formation—both local and
diasporic—articulate an inextricable tie between time and space. Again, these
narratives can be marshalled to challenge some of the foundational and unques-
tioned premises of contemporary diaspora theory. Black seamen's decidedly
fluid orientation in space is commonly heralded as a triumphant History, for
they are credited with essentially giving birth to the black community. In addi-
tion, people suggested that if it were not for the seamen, Liverpool blacks would
not have had access to certain foods and exciting music from Africa and the
United States. Hence, Liverpool was created as a diasporic space through local
black seamen's actual engagements with multiple geographies. Like the black
seamen, the GIs brought another world into Liverpool 8, making local space
cosmopolitan and "opening things up," as Greg put it. The city was further trans-
formed through the appropriation of black American strategies of racial empow-
erment by the young blacks who pushed back the boundaries of where local
blackness could be lived. Speaking from an earlier generation, Caroline also re-
called the presence of black America joyfully: "Liverpool used to be a smashing
place; all the smart ones got out." These nostalgic reminiscences offer occasion
to rethink the ways that time and space should figure in theories of diasporic
subjectivity, for in Liverpool it seems that "the past" is not a trope for Africa; on
the contrary, it signifies the glory days of black Liverpool. But gendered antago-
nisms profoundly shaped the production of another form of diasporic space, the
one mapped by black Liverpudlian women's transatlantic travel.
Setting Sail (Again)

Black women's travels, like those of black Liverpool's men, were born of
rigidly gendered historical circumstance—the GIs were men.25 This fact alone
enables inquiry into how men and women, as travelers, are differently valued as
producers of diasporic space. Just as the African seamen "created" black Liver-
pool, black women's migration to the United States expanded the space within
which black Liverpool presently exists. I scarcely knew a black Liverpudlian
who did not have at least one female relative in the United States. Despite men's
rather neutral stance on their own sisters' migrations, when black men com-
mented upon the general phenomenon of black women moving to the United
States, their remarks were drenched in disapproval. Men's narratives on the ex-
clusively male migrations from Africa to Britain were completely devoid of cri-
tique, unlike the views they expressed about black Liverpudlian women as mi-
grants.26 Despite the possibility that African seafarers could have chosen to
settle in Liverpool for reasons at least partially economic, black men did not in-
voke this rationale sympathetically in their explanations of black women's mi-
gration. The gendered interpretations of these migrations are indeed quite sharp,
for in contrast to black women's representation of their mass exodus, black men
said things like "America is like a dream, a carrot. America is seen as an escape.
It's seen as a place of prosperity."27
The gendering of travel can be analyzed further by comparing the meanings
attached to the return of black seamen and black women migrants to Liverpool.
It will be recalled that black seafarers' return to Liverpool's shores was an event
marked by parties "of an African style," as Scott said in an earlier quotation. On
the contrary, the tendency among women to drop their anchors back in the city's
port is narrated with criticism—by men. On the matter of black women's return,
one man chided women for having pursued an American avenue of opportunity
in the first place, essentially representing their return in terms of a failed defec-
tion. He remarked, "And then there were the ones who got married, went to the
States, couldn't handle it, and came back. The story's out now: it's not milk and
honey, the grass is not any greener." In a more generous vein, black men spoke
of black women as naive, suggesting that they were taken in by the apparent
wealth of "the Yanks," as it was rather deceptively manifested in Liverpool, and
by their big talk about having huge homes back in the States. Scott added an-
other factor in their return: they returned to Liverpool because "they couldn't
handle the racism in the southern states."
Kathleen was one of four black women I knew who had married GIs,
moved to the United States, and subsequently returned to Liverpool. She felt
acutely the criticism leveled against black women for leaving, and the stigma at-
tached to their return. Her father, an African, absolutely loathed the idea of her
marrying an American and moving to the United States. She left despite his
wishes. Kathleen recalled that her father bid her good-bye thus: "It's not like
you're leaving; it's like you're dying." Kathleen's marriage dissolved not long
after she settled in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She considered returning to Liver-
pool, but changed her mind after receiving a letter from her father in which he
mentioned the daughter of a friend of his who had "gone to the States and mar-
ried an American, and look at what happened to her! She's back in England now
with her three babies, living off her father." She delayed visiting Liverpool for
years, so that she could save enough money to go back in style and escape the
criticism for having left. On that first visit back she observed that "it felt as de-
pressed as it was when I left, and in fact it felt even more depressed because now
I had seen something different. So I made the conscious decision to remain in the
United States because I felt I had more opportunities."28 In stark contrast to most
black Liverpudlian women I knew, those who went to the United States and later
returned to Liverpool are now successful professionals. Kathleen said specifi-
cally that the survival skills she honed in the United States "made me the woman
I am today."
Indeed, these women's difficulties adjusting to life in that mythical land
called "black America" began with their complete isolation. The demographic
spread of these women's relocation, across the geographic expanse that is the
United States, made it unlikely that they would be able to form community with
other black women from Liverpool. Of the four women I knew who migrated to
the United States, one had lived in New York, one in Pennsylvania, another in
Texas, and yet another in Utah. In their singularity, these women were absolute
novelties, the charm of which wore thin rather quickly. And after two genera-
tions of black American hegemony in Liverpool, these women were under-
standably shocked that black Americans were so completely ignorant about the
black presence in England. Karen put it best, saying, "I think they thought Eng-
land consisted only of white people in bowler hats sitting around drinking tea."
Two women, independently of each other, said that when they told black Ameri-
cans that they were from Liverpool, they were met with the question "Liver-
pool? What part of Africa is that?" Kathleen discussed the difficulty of befriend-
ing black American women, and the kinds of dialogues that would ensue when
she finally did make friends: "They were shocked that there were black people
in England. In fact, a number of black women that I befriended in the early years
thought that I was putting on airs, and that I really didn't talk this way. So once
I got over that hurdle it was like, 'Why did you marry a black American? You
could have married anybody!' "
Conclusion
The black Liverpudlians in this analysis have given voice to the fractured
subjectivities formed and transformed along axes of nation, gender, class, and
sexuality—all mediated through "race" as constructed locally and through lo-
cality. Their accounts suggest the benefit of an ethnographic approach to the
study of diasporic identity formation and its cultural politics. Produced in the
crucible of multiply-inflected and spatially-organized relations of power, trans-
national formations of community are best understood by studying at least two
phenomena: first, the locally-specific social relations and associated subjectivi-
ties about locality that produce a group's desire to appropriate diasporic re-
sources, and second, the processes through which certain geographies attain a
hegemonic position at the center of a group's diasporic consciousness. Even
though diasporas are formed through processes that are themselves global in
scope, these processes and their effects are not everywhere localized, gendered,
and racialized in the same way.
Few contemporary meditations on globalization pause to note the racially
empowering practices which that process can enable. Most accounts of globali-
zation ascribe to "the West," as well as to "America," a monolithic white iden-
tity. In this regard it becomes highly significant that American hegemony has
taken such a decidedly black form in Liverpool. This is also a key irony, for that
hegemony allowed black Americans to exert a class privilege in Liverpool that
they would not have had if they had lived in the United States during the post-
war, civil rights, and Black Power eras. Hollywood images shown at the Rialto
must have been powerful shapers in the construction of the United States (and by
extension, the black GIs) as glamorous and wealthy. More specifically still, the
myth unleashed by American hegemony was that there existed a place called
"black America" that would somehow resemble its various embodiments in Liv-
erpool—a premise embedded in statements referring to the States as "the place
where it was all happening." The black Liverpudlian woman who wound up in
Utah could, no doubt, complicate that view. Despite black Liverpudlian men's
critique of both the Americans and the black Liverpudlian women who appro-
priated the fabled land of "black America" as a material resource, Liverpool's
black men were nonetheless able to draw on the GIs' presence, their relentless
visibility, as a symbolic resource of their own—as proof that it is possible for a
person with black skin to drive a big car down Granby Street, as Greg put it.
The power imbalance between black America and black Liverpool—char-
acterized by the decidedly unidirectional transnational flow of iconography and
ideas, ideologies and inspirations—is still evident everywhere.29 Prominent
black Liverpudlian men in their fifties, for example, were heard grumbling
when, in 1992, a black youth organization invited Leonard Jeffries (the noted
proponent of Afrocentrism and professor at City College in New York) to speak
in Liverpool. "Why not invite a black British person?" they queried, wearily.
When, in 1994, the city's Maritime Museum opened a permanent exhibit to
document Liverpool's history as a slave port, African American poet Maya An-
gelou accepted an invitation as the keynote speaker. As beloved as she is in Liv-
erpool, locals still insisted that a black Liverpudlian also play a prominent
speaking role. In the public library across the street from the Boundary (a pub
cited earlier), low-budget posters promoting local black artists grace the walls;
but these are overshadowed by the presence of much slicker ones featuring Af-
rican American writers Alice Walker and June Jordan. To this day, when black
American sailors dock in Liverpool's port, black women flock to the city's
nightclubs "looking for the Yanks!" as one twenty-something black woman ex-
citedly told me. Except for these sailors and some scattered former GIs (and the
families of those who married black Liverpudlian women), U.S. blacks do not know
that this community—so profoundly affected by black America—even exists.
As alternately embodied in people, place, and culture, diasporic resources
can be used to open up liberating spaces for people who, for varied reasons, feel
that they "are not fully positioned in any position," as Greg so nicely put it. Yet
liberating spaces scarcely free everyone completely, or in the same way. The an-
thropology of diaspora must attend, therefore, to the multiple plays of difference
underlying its formation. The effects of these show, in turn, that the identities ly-
ing at the heart of diasporic subjectivity are never fully positioned in any position.
Notes
Acknowledgments. The data presented here are based on research funded by the Na-
tional Science Foundation (BNS#9024515), the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthro-
pological Research, and the Center for European Studies at Stanford University. I wish
to acknowledge here my deep appreciation to the black Liverpudlians who generously
shared so much of their lives with me. The anonymous reviewers for this journal, par-
ticularly number two, offered penetrating, and often inspired, critiques. I am further in-
debted to Bruce Knauft, Kathryn Chetkovich, and especially Lisa Rofel, all of whom
steadfastly guided this work to completion. I thank the intellectual communities (inclu-
sive of faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students) of the various institutions where I
have presented versions of this article; these include Stanford University; Emory Uni-
versity; the University of California, Santa Cruz; Duke University; the University of
California, Berkeley; and Spelman College. I extend special thanks to Rudolph Byrd,
Tina Campt, Donald Donham, Akhil Gupta, Tina Johnson, Donald Moore, Susan Rein-
hold, Renato Rosaldo, and Sylvia Yanagisako, all of whom seriously engaged and en-
couraged this work. Heartfelt thanks go to Caroline Brown, Crystal Terry, Karen L.
Stroud, and Ingrid Pollard. While all of these friends and colleagues should share credit
for producing this work, I stand alone in accepting responsibility for its shortcomings.
1. Although I use the term black Liverpudlian throughout this article, it should be
noted that the black Liverpudlians I knew never referred to themselves or others this
way. I use this term to avoid the more common, but often contentious, term Liverpool-
born black. The genealogy of this latter term, and the contestations that surround it, are
beyond the scope of the present article.
2. Gilroy defines ethnic absolutism as "a reductive, essentialist understanding of
ethnic and national difference which operates through an absolute sense of culture so
powerful that it is capable of separating people off from each other and diverting them
into social and historical locations that are understood to be mutually impermeable and
incommensurable" (1993b:65).
3. Here he also echoes the important observations of the late St. Clair Drake, who
argued that black movements in which African descendants formed links with Africans
were motivated by a "struggle against racial derogation and for some degree of auton-
omy from white control, not a common admiration for African cultures" (Drake
1982:353, emphasis added).
4. In conversation with colleagues, I have often heard arguments against assigning
The Black Atlantic in anthropology courses because of its emphasis on biography.
Again, St. Clair Drake affirms Gilroy's approach, suggesting that "comparative biogra-
phy should be an important component of diaspora studies . . . " (Drake 1982:349). He
continues,
At a subliminal level we must remember [figures] in the diaspora and the homeland . .. [includ-
ing] black Americans who did not feel that they could live and work in the United States. We are
not discussing any of our exiled, detained, imprisoned or silenced intellectuals, but there is an
obligation upon us to keep their names alive in our footnotes at least. They must not be forgotten
as living examples of some aspects of black history—diaspora and homeland—working them-
selves out over centuries. [Drake 1982:356, emphasis added]
5. Here we might productively draw on the work of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, who
analyzes marginality in what she calls an "out-of-the-way" place as an effect of "dis-
placement from powerful discourses on civilization and progress" (Tsing 1993:7-8) that
are at once national (Indonesian) and global. My own project offers a further interroga-
tion of how such marginal positions are effected, for Liverpool, despite its location in
"the West," is an "out-of-the-way place"—marginal socially, culturally, and geographi-
cally—in the context of British society, as well as in African diasporic imaginaries cen-
tered in the United States.
6. In the same seminal, if curiously neglected article quoted above, St. Clair Drake
celebrates the ideals of pan-Africanism, but points direct attention to the ways black
Americans have at times used their greater political clout over Africa to exploit their
"brethren."
7. The narratives presented here derive from two bodies of ethnographic data. The
first is interview data collected in 1991 and 1992, in which informants responded to a
wide variety of questions about race and racism; blackness, Englishness, and British-
ness; their family histories of migration and settlement; gender and class politics in their
community; and their investment in local belonging. The second set of data consists of
black Liverpudlians' representations of "their history" as proffered in public contexts,
such as political meetings and cultural events held in community centers in black neigh-
borhoods, and around Liverpool more broadly. Here I also include intellectual and cul-
tural productions in which black Liverpudlians represent themselves to themselves, and
to a wider audience. The citation of the black Liverpudlian scholar Mark Christian
1995-96 here represents an example of such an academic representation. Similarly, an
art exhibit about the black Liverpudlian past (not specifically referred to here) produced
by a group of local black women, as well as a historical documentary exhibit called
"Staying Power: Black Presence in Liverpool" (mounted in the city's Labour History
Museum), represent still further examples of blacks' renderings of that history for public
consumption. It is from these combined sources that I derive the three key themes in lo-
cal black history that I outline here. It bears note in this context that all names used are
fictitious. Quoted interview material reflects the original emphases given by the speaker.
8. The history of black migration in the port cities of Liverpool, Bristol, and Car-
diff, Wales differs markedly from that of other British cities. Readers should be cau-
tioned against generalizing the common "postwar Caribbean migration" narrative to the
entirety of the British Isles, as this discursive practice (so common in Britain) margin-
alizes the old black communities centered in its ports. It also negates the early presence
of black seamen in London. Note, for example, Kobena Mercer's representation of black
Britain's history: "Born in the great migrations of the 1940s, fifties and sixties, and com-
ing of age in the 1970s, eighties and nineties, entire generations of black Britons have
had the complex and contradictory vicissitudes of late modernity as our conditions of
existence" (Mercer 1994:2, emphasis added). Note, by contrast, the ages of black Liver-
pudlians in this article, and how commonly they say that their parents were born in the
city! See Hesse 1993 for commentary on the common exclusion of earlier migration his-
tories from the scholarship on black Britain. It bears noting that Liverpool also received
postwar Caribbean migrants, and that they and their children also routinely begin their
narratives on the history of black Liverpool with the arrival of African seamen.
9. Helmreich was responding to Gilroy's article "Cultural Studies and Ethnic Ab-
solutism" (1992), which was a precursor to the monograph The Black Atlantic: Mo-
dernity and Double Consciousness (1993a).
10. See also Grewal and Kaplan 1994 and Kaplan 1996.
11. I thank Paul Gilroy for pointing this out to me at a very early stage in my research.
12. See the collection edited by Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling for more
challenges to these views. In their introduction, for example, they argue against the no-
tion that "women and shoreside institutions were tangential to maritime experience"
(Creighton and Norling 1996:vii). As further testimony to the relative power of the port
over the sea, Lane (1986) shows how the masculinity of colonial seamen was compro-
mised by the way racial power was exercised on ships, essentially "reducing" African
men to feminized occupations.
13. See for example Lord Gifford et alia 1989, Frost 1995-96, and Christian
1995-96.
14. This should not be taken to mean that black men never partnered black women;
even in the data I have presented thus far, there is evidence of such unions. Historian
Laura Tabili has documented early cases, but does so in a way that actually corroborates
the dominant narrative articulated in Liverpool. She writes,
Owing to a scarcity of Black women, couples typically comprised a Black husband and a white
wife. Still, there were some Black women in Britain's seaport neighborhoods, and as in other ra-
cially mixed societies Black men married them when they were available. Although numeri-
cally small, their presence serves as tacit repudiation of the stress on Black and white men
competing for white women, racist in its view of Black women as less desirable and sexist in its
view of all women as passive in gender relations. [ 1994:145]
My emphasis, it must be remembered, is to outline the way black Liverpudlians commonly
tell their story.
15. A distinction must be drawn between two worthwhile ethnographic agendas:
that which seeks to explain the phenomenon of interracial marriage in particular cultural
contexts (as in the work of Verena Martinez-Alier [ 1974], and in the more recent works
of Roger Sanjek [ 1994] and Kevin Birth [1997]) and that of the present study, which at-
tends to people's explanations of and feelings about that practice toward the larger goal
of showing the effects of these subjectivities in their very particular social world. Here I
am seeking to explain the way blacks are positioned by, and position themselves within,
debates on local and diasporic identity, rather than the "real" reasons, in what might be
considered sociological terms, that some blacks marry across racial lines.
16. The question of numbers has confounded scholars of the black presence in Liv-
erpool from the very earliest of studies through to the present day. Census data have al-
ways been particularly unreliable. Figures on blacks resident in Liverpool in the 18th
and 19th centuries are compromised by the very transient nature of seamen's lives (see
Myers 1996 for a review of the historical literature that has attempted to provide such a
count). Add to this the great variability and flux in the construction of racial categories
over time, and black people's unwillingness to answer census questions on race for fear
that the data might be used in all manner of unsavory ways, and the problems mount. In
1989, a government inquiry into racial discrimination complained about the lack of de-
finitive figures on the size of the black community, noting that the commonly quoted fig-
ure of 40,000 (or 8 percent of the population) is "based on informed speculation rather
than science" (Lord Gifford 1989:37). In 1992, the Office of Population Censuses and
Surveys announced that "science" had determined there to be 6,786 blacks in the city, or
1.5 percent of the total population (OPCS 1992).
17. Black women are also partnered with white men, but these relationships have
been highly stigmatized by black men, many of whom are themselves married across ra-
cial lines. I knew several black women with white partners who would not bring these
men to public social events. Conversely, any such event in Liverpool would play host to
numerous black men and their white female friends or wives.
18. James Clifford (1988) has rightly warned of the dangers of regarding ethnogra-
phy as the scholarly discourse that tells a people's complete, unmediated, and ultimate
"truth." While I respect black Liverpudlians' ability to tell their version of "their story,"
I in no way deny my role as interlocutor here. (In this regard, the reader may be interested
to know that I am black American.) Similarly, I realize that the memories that have pro-
duced these black Liverpudlian narratives are highly selective. I try indeed to highlight
the ways these memories speak to informants' own positions within local debates.
19. For more on black and white American GIs in England, and the racial politics
of that presence, see David Reynolds 1995, Cynthia Enloe 1989, and Graham Smith
1987. These studies focus on the relations between black GIs and white British women,
rather than with black British women as in the present study.
20. I have been asked many times, with good reason, about the normalization of
heterosexuality in this article, as this work focuses only on male-female sexual relations
in the city at the expense of homosexual ones. I ask the reader to imagine the difficulty
of posing questions about homosexual sex and relationships not only to ex-seafarers (all
married with children), but also to others with whom the researcher wished to maintain
good relations. Similarly, I asked black women about their relations with black American
men; scarcely did it seem appropriate to ask them about their possible sexual relations
with women, or about servicemen's sexual relations with other men. These circum-
stances notwithstanding, I regret that I cannot comment on homosexual relationships of
any kind, despite the fact that I did look for signs of contemporary black gay life there.
21. Caroline noted that the black Americans also dated white women and that they
indeed felt liberated by their ability to do so without the taboo that accompanied such
pairings in the United States. The Yanks' racial politics of desire can be contextualized
further, for here was a city where the overwhelming majority of black women had physi-
cal features historically preferred by black American men: light skin.
22. Because there were numerous kinds of ships (containers, trailers, cargo liners,
passenger liners, et cetera), each of which underwent shifts in usage and availability, it
is difficult to put an exact date on the decline of the entire industry. For example, one
prominent sociologist of the industry, particularly as it concerns Liverpool seamen,
notes at once that,
Throughout the postwar years the number of British ships and the number of seamen have con-
sistently fallen. In 1950 there were over 3,300 ships but by the end of 1984 only 940 or so. This
huge reduction in fleet size embraces a number of other changes which have transformed the
seafaring life. The decline of empire, the expansion of trade with Europe, changes in types of
ship, in voyage patterns, company ownership, size of crew and division of labour, the nature of
work and the social environment of the ship have combined to turn the seagoing life upside
down. [Lane 1986:7]
He goes on to delineate the steady, if erratic, pace of decline by the turn of each decade,
beginning in 1950. Elsewhere, however, he states that "at any time after the Second World
War until the mid-1970s there were only the odd months when a seaman would find it hard
to get a j o b . . . . With a ready availability of ships and a complete spectrum of trades and
world regions to choose from, it was an entirely normal thing to move around and be
apparently footloose" (1986:22).
23. Liverpool's post-shipping economy retains what one study calls "a legacy of a
relatively unskilled workforce" (Liverpool City Council 1987:15). This is reflected in
the city's sobering unemployment rate which has, for decades, exceeded national aver-
ages. In 1986,55 percent of the city's unemployed population had been without work for
more than a year, compared to 41 percent nationally. Twenty-nine percent had been
without work for over three years, and 8,500 people on the register of unemployed peo-
ple had not worked in over five years (Liverpool City Council 1987:15). Going further
back to the era under discussion, it is notable that between 1974 and 1980 the unemploy-
ment rate in Liverpool had increased by 120 percent, a figure which becomes even more
alarming when "race" is specified. The same study indicates that the number of black un-
employed workers increased by 350 percent over the same six-year period. The unem-
ployment rate among black youth was 32.5 percent in 1971 (compared to 19.5 percent
for white youth) and by 1980 had jumped to 47 percent (Merseyside Area Profile Group
1980:12).
24. Africans in Liverpool, Africanist anthropologists, and Africans in the United
States have all strenuously argued to me that the term half-caste has no derogatory mean-
ings in Africa. It is simply, they claim, a term to denote mixed racial parentage. Despite
this qualification, the term has been extremely hurtful to blacks of mixed parentage
whom I interviewed in Liverpool. Karen's quotation testifies aptly to this. It bears em-
phasis that the term half-caste is also popularly used by white Liverpudlians, albeit to a
lesser extent now than in the past.
25. Thanks to Yara-Colette Lemke Muniz de Faria for calling my attention to a
study by Brenda L. Moore (1996) on the few black American women stationed in Eng-
land and France during and after World War II.
26. I do not want to suggest that there are no African women in Liverpool, for many
have indeed emigrated there. Their migration occurred later (in the 1950s and 1960s) un-
der circumstances not directly related to those that brought the seafarers to the city.
27. See Small 1991 and 1994 for a sociological analysis of black Britons' percep-
tions of the United States as a place of relative advantage for black people, as well as for
a comparative analysis of racialization processes in Britain and the United States.
28. Kathleen eventually settled in London, where I interviewed her.
29. Despite the recent proliferation of dialogues between black British and black
American cultural critics (for example, Gilroy 1993c; Mercer 1994), such equal and
amicable relations have not been established between black America and black Britain
on a mass scale.
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2) - Nassy Brown, Jacqueline 1998. "Black Liverpool, Black America, and The Gendering of Diasporic Space

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2) - Nassy Brown, Jacqueline 1998. "Black Liverpool, Black America, and The Gendering of Diasporic Space

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Black Liverpool, Black America, and

the Gendering of Diasporic Space

Afraid is a country with no exit visas.

Cultural Anthropology I3(3):29I-325. Copyright © 1998, American Anthropological Association.

call—many in the United States. Narratives of black Liverpudlians' diasporic

Geographies of Diaspora Theory

Gilroy's originality is marked in the first instance by the simple choice of

of these and other black American artists and intellectuals fundamentally

The contribution that Hill's gurning techniques or anglo-vernacular characters

He adopts an especially vehement tone to condemn such instances of ethnic ab-

Setting Sail: The Birth of Liverpool's Black Community

As the very basis of local identity, the seafaring tradition is implicated in

Echoing Helmreich, Clifford goes on to note thatGilroy's black Atlantic history

Several black Liverpudlians told me of a much earlier study of this phe-

Black Americans Drop Anchor

An important site in the cultural geography of blackness in the city, across

As indicated earlier, interracial relationships in Liverpool have been com-

Here we may begin to see that it is exclusionary racial practices occurring

Civil Rights and Black Power in This "Very African" City

Others spoke of similar contributions black America made to their racial

I definitely became aware of being non-British, non-white. I can't say I became

Black Liverpudlians' pained relation to "Africa" coexists with their pride in

It would be tempting to read young black Liverpudlians' interest in Africa, even

A similarly gendered view and experience of black America was articulated by

Women's representations of their attraction to the GIs differed consider-

A woman like me was marginalized because I was seen as a feminist. A couple of

Setting Sail (Again)

Merseyside Area Profile Group

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