Visual Culture and Decolonisation in Britain


Book Description

First published in 2006, this volume provides the first in-depth analysis of the place of visual representations within the process of decolonisation during the period 1945 to 1970. The chapters trace the way in which different visual genres – art, film, advertising, photography, news reports and ephemera – represented and contributed to the political and social struggles over Empire and decolonisation during the mid-Twentieth century. The book examines both the direct visual representation of imperial retreat after 1945 as well as the reworkings of imperial and ‘racial’ ideologies within the context of a transformed imperialism. While the book engages with the dominant archive of artists, exhibitions, newsreels and films, it also explores the private images of the family album as well as examining the visual culture of anti-colonial resistance.




Age of Emergency


Book Description

Analyzing the period after 1945 when uprisings against colonial rule broke out across the world, Age of Emergency (Oxford University Press), focuses on how violence was experienced in the lives of ordinary people in imperial Britain. Using various historical records including letters, television, newspapers, novels, and more, Linstrum uncovers the violent torture, executions, and gruesome punishments the community faced. Throughout his writing, Linstrum demonstrates the significance of war beyond the fight between soldiers, and the ways in which war encroaches on all aspects of life.




Black Handsworth


Book Description

In 1980s Britain, while the country failed to reckon with the legacies of its empire, a black, transnational sensibility was emerging in its urban areas. In Handsworth, an inner-city neighborhood of Birmingham, black residents looked across the Atlantictoward African and Afro-Caribbean social and political cultures and drew upon them while navigating the inequalities of their locale. For those of the Windrush generation and their British-born children, this diasporic inheritance became a core influence on cultural and political life. Through rich case studies, including photographic representations of the neighborhood, Black Handsworth takes readers inside pubs, churches, political organizations, domestic spaces, and social clubs to shed light on the experiences and everyday lives of black residents during this time. The result is a compelling and sophisticated study of black globality in the making of post-colonial Britain.




"Landscape, Art and Identity in 1950s Britain "


Book Description

During the years following World War II debates about the British landscape fused with questions of national identity as the country reconstructed its sense of self. For better or for worse artists, statesmen, and ordinary citizens saw themselves reflected in the landscape, and in turn helped to shape the way that others envisioned the land. While landscape art is frequently imagined in terms of painting, this book examines the role of landscape in terms of a broader definition of visual culture to include the discussion not only of works of oil on canvas, but also prints, sculpture, photography, advertising, fashion journalism, artists' biographies, and the multi-media stage of the national exhibition. Making extensive use of archival materials (newspaper reviews, radio broadcasts, interviews with artists, letters and exhibition planning documents), Catherine Jolivette explores the intersection of landscape art with a variety of discourses including the role of women in contemporary society, the status of immigrant artists in Britain, developments in science and technology, and the promotion of British art and culture abroad.




Image Matters


Book Description

Campt explores the affective resonances of two archives of Black European photographs for those pictured, their families, and the community. Image Matters looks at photograph collections of four Black German families taken between 1900 and the end of World War II and a set of portraits of Afro-Caribbean migrants to Britain taken at a photographic studio in Birmingham between 1948 and 1960.




Scripting Empire


Book Description

A volume on the literary and cultural history of West Indian and West African writing at the BBC. The volume covers over 40 different radio programmes which appeared within the 'Calling West Africa' and 'Calling West Indies' schedules between 1941 and 1965 and brings together a wide range of uncatalogued archive materials.




Art and Masculinity in Post-War Britain


Book Description

In this book, Gregory Salter traces how artists represented home and masculinities in the period of social and personal reconstruction after the Second World War in Britain. Salter considers home as an unstable entity at this historical moment, imbued with the optimism and hopes of post-war recovery while continuing to resonate with the memories and traumas of wartime. Artists examined in the book include John Bratby, Francis Bacon, Keith Vaughan, Francis Newton Souza and Victor Pasmore. Case studies featured range from the nuclear family and the body, to the nation. Combined, they present an argument that art enables an understanding of post-war reconstruction as a temporally unstable, long-term phenomenon which placed conceptions of home and masculinity at the heart of its aims. Art and Masculinity in Post-War Britain sheds new light on how the fluid concepts of society, nation, masculinity and home interacted and influenced each other at this critical period in history and will be of interest to anyone studying art history, anthropology, sociology, history and cultural and heritage studies.




Thinking Black


Book Description

It was a common charge among black radicals in the 1960s that Britons needed to start “thinking black.” As state and society consolidated around a revived politics of whiteness, “thinking black,” they felt, was necessary for all who sought to build a liberated future out of Britain’s imperial past. In Thinking Black, Rob Waters reveals black radical Britain’s wide cultural-political formation, tracing it across new institutions of black civil society and connecting it to decolonization and black liberation across the Atlantic world. He shows how, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, black radicalism defined what it meant to be black and what it meant to be radical in Britain.




British Art in the Nuclear Age


Book Description

Rooted in the study of objects, British Art in the Nuclear Age addresses the role of art and visual culture in discourses surrounding nuclear science and technology, atomic power, and nuclear warfare in Cold War Britain. Examining both the fears and hopes for the future that attended the advances of the nuclear age, nine original essays explore the contributions of British-born and ?gr?rtists in the areas of sculpture, textile and applied design, painting, drawing, photo-journalism, and exhibition display. Artists discussed include: Francis Bacon, John Bratby, Lynn Chadwick, Prunella Clough, Naum Gabo, Barbara Hepworth, Peter Lanyon, Henry Moore, Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter Laszlo Peri, Isabel Rawsthorne, Alan Reynolds, Colin Self, Graham Sutherland, Feliks Topolski and John Tunnard. Also under discussion is new archival material from Picture Post magazine, and the Festival of Britain. Far from insular in its concerns, this volume draws upon cross-cultural dialogues between British and European artists and the relationship between Britain and America to engage with an interdisciplinary art history that will also prove useful to students and researchers in a variety of fields including modern European history, political science, the history of design, anthropology, and media studies.