Profiling the Literature Salons of the British Black Arts Movement
By Kaysyn Jones
Hello! My name is Kaysyn Jones. I am currently a junior pursuing a B.A. in English, a minor in Museum Studies, and a B.S. in African American Studies. I am originally from Pennsylvania, but my family and I have lived in St. Augustine, FL, for the past 10 years — which might be why I find myself so interested in narratives surrounding migration. My family history spans the United States from coast to coast, but we’ve never been able to find where we first crossed the Atlantic. Over the course of this project, I will do just that.
As a researcher, I am passionate about the Harlem Renaissance, weird art and literature, and people’s stories. In the past, I have conducted research revolving around early 20th century African American artists and writers. My research this summer will be reaching outside of my comfort zone to analyze and research much more contemporary writers of the African diaspora in London, England. My research is specifically being funded through the Tyler Fellowship and my faculty mentor for this project is Dr. Alisha Gaines.
From the 1980s to the 1990s, the British Black Arts Movement was a key site of Black identity formation in England. While there has been new interest in the visual art of the movement, there has been far less attention paid to the literature and poetry produced during that era. Many of the writers in operation were of Caribbean or continental African descent, but unlike the literary movements of the 1960s, there was a distinct focus on the 2nd and 3rd generations of immigrants in the United Kingdom. The Movement primarily operated out of London, with a rapid proliferation of Black-owned independent presses facilitating a rise in the publishing of African and Caribbean writers. Groups like the Brixton Black Women's Group and bookstores like the Bogle L’Ouverture Books provided venues for writers to congregate and collaborate.
My project this summer will be to create a detailed profile of a notable British literary space that produced a distinct picture of Black identity as part of my broader Honors in the Major research. The physical locations where writers convened during the British Black Arts Movement have gone almost entirely unexplored. I will be utilizing both archival and literary research in order to identify those spaces and the people who occupied them. Furthermore, I will conduct oral history interviews with the members of the movement who still reside in London and its surrounding areas. During the span of this research, I will reside in London for a total of 6 weeks, as none of the archival materials I must review are digitized.
One archive I will visit is the Black Cultural Archives. Their Runnymede periodicals collection and Black British arts ephemera collection will contain records of where these spaces were as well as invaluable insight into the self-ontology of Black British writers of the time. The London Archive, the second archive I will visit, houses the Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications collection, the Clapton Youth Centre collection, and the Africa Centre collection, all of which directly pertain to the physical locations I want to investigate. Finally, the George Padmore Institute houses the papers of the formal Caribbean Artists Movement, which operated out of London, and whose members played a crucial role in the formation of the category of Black British art in the late 1970s.
Furthermore, I have identified several notable figures who were instrumental or otherwise prominent during the British Black Arts movement who still live in or around London, such as Margaret Busby, Stella Dadzie, and Ben Okri, among others. Before embarking to London, I intend to reach out to these individuals to interview them on their experiences regarding literary spaces and Black identity at the time. By being physically in the area, I hope to collect these histories in a more natural environment without the concerns of digital complications and compile an oral history of the Black British Arts Movement through the lens of its writers and publishers.
Alongside my archival research and interviews, I will be reading published literature from the Movement, such as Daughters of Africa and I am Becoming My Mother to gain a deeper level of understanding for the literary landscape of the time. I will conduct closer readings and analyses after I establish the specific circles of writers, and derive my conclusions on what these writers were saying about Black identity from this literature.
I am incredibly excited to get to work on this project over the course of the summer. I hope that you’ll stick around to see what I do!