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ed. Kwesi Owusu. London: Routledge, 2000. 545 pp. ISBN 0-415-17846-0 paper.
This substantial collection is divided into two sections: the first consists of eleven essays referring to the forty years following the arrival of the first boatload of Caribbean immigrants in 1048; the second consists of thirty-one essays and interviews almost entirely recorded in the 1990s. In Britain, the category "black" for reasons of political solidarity may include peoples whose ancestral origins are in the Indian subcontinent, and this is reflected in the inclusion of several Asian commentators, notably A. Sivanandan, editor of Race and Class, Rasheed Araeen, editor of Third Text, and Heidi Safia Mirza. However, by far the greater majority of the contributors are of African and African-Caribbean origin.
Kwesi Owusu's introduction locates the origins of cultural studies as a discipline in Britain in the 1950s alongside the sudden increase in immigration from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent. Hence, he sees the development of black cultural studies as a significant...