A Social History of Black British Journalism: Caribbean Writers in Britain

Abstract

This thesis explores the history of West Indian news writing and newspapers in England across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Scholars have written on the importance of literary fiction in the story of a Black British writing tradition, but the specific genre of journalism and the complex relationships involved in this kind of literary production have not yet been explained in Caribbean Studies, British Literature or Media studies. This thesis analyses the important positioning of newspapers led by Caribbean writers in Britain and examines how different publications operated in response to and ahead of the traditional media. This work also examines how West Indian-led newspapers in Britain affected political and social change in the Caribbean region and in Britain.

This thesis recognises the West-Indian led Black British press as providing extensive archival material on matters of local and international importance where popular publishers and newspapers failed to incorporate Black writers. It recalls journalists, mainly from the early to mid-twentieth centuries, to put forward and argument for recognising a Caribbean and Black British journalism tradition.

Through archival and biographical research, case studies and content analysis, this thesis makes a series of significant claims on the role of Caribbean journalism to the makings of a ‘Black British’ identity. One of these claims is that the Empire Windrush as a symbol of ‘Black Britishness’ was created from the press archives of the arrival. This in turn, raises questions about canonisation, curation and collective memory that run throughout my discussion on why Caribbean-led newspapers have been mostly left out of discourse and study of Black British Literature.