Could you name a British black intellectual, now Stuart Hall has gone?

Paul Warmington, The Guardian

As a pioneer of cultural studies and coiner of the term "Thatcherism", Prof Stuart Hall, who died this week, was in the truest sense a public intellectual. He was also something else: probably the only black British intellectual who most people could readily name.

A bit of prompting might produce mention of Paul Gilroy of King's College, author of The Empire Strikes Back and Black Atlantic, who has recently returned to Britain after several years in America's more fertile ebony towers. But how many other black British thinkers have a public profile?

How Colonial India Made Modern Britain

: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain by TigersEye99

Riots as Political Action

by Benjamin Fogel

Black people gotta lot a problems
But they don't mind throwing a brick
White people go to school
Where they teach you how to be thick

An' everybody's doing
Just what they're told to
An' nobody wants
To go to jail!
White riot - I wanna riot
White riot - a riot of my own
White riot - I wanna riot
White riot - a riot of my own
All the power's in the hands
Of people rich enough to buy it
While we walk the street
Too chicken to even try it “

The Clash, White Riot

London Calling: Fanon, Spontaneity and the English insurrections

Nigel C. Gibson

Every time a man has contributed to the victory of the spirit, every time a man says no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act … Yes to life. Yes to love. Yes to generosity … No to the contempt … No to degradation… No to exploitation … No to the butchery of what is most human … freedom.

Fanon

Silence the Criminal

by Simone Arielle Levy

Fifty years later, Frantz Fanon, the Martinican revolutionary who inspired Steve Biko, lives on. His writings, and the conversations that they continue to inspire, reach beyond skin colour into the deeper politics of the human mind in Fanon's questioning of what it is to be human. In ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, Fanon looks at what he calls the cognitive dissonance that emerges when people are presented with new evidence that contradicts their core beliefs. Fanon says that “because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief."

Planet of Slums, Age of Riots

by George Ciccariello-Maher, CounterPunch

Tottenham, Chile, Tunis…

There are too many to count

Oakland, Brixton, Taybat al-Imam…

Street-Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties

by Tariq Ali
 

One of the world's best-known radicals relives the early years of the protest movement.

In this new edition of his memoirs, Tariq Ali revisits his formative years as a young radical. It is a story that takes us from Paris and Prague to Hanoi and Bolivia, encountering along the way Malcolm X, Bertrand Russell, Marlon Brando, Henry Kissinger, and Mick Jagger.

Ali captures the mood and energy of those years as he tracks the growing significance of the nascent protest movement.

The Making of the English Working Class

"Thompson's book has been called controversial, but perhaps only because so many have forgotten how explosive England was during the Regency and the early reign of Victoria. Without any reservation, The Making of the English Working Class is the most important study of those days since the classic work of the Hammonds." --Ben B. Seligman, Commentary

 

  "Here is a true masterpiece..." --Michael Foot, London Tribune

The London Hanged: Crime And Civil Society In The Eighteenth Century

This groundbreaking history aids any understanding of the rise of capitalism.

Peter Linebaugh’s groundbreaking history has become an inescapable part of any understanding of the rise of capitalism. In eighteenth-century London the spectacle of a hanging was not simply a form of punishing transgressors.

Rather it evidently served the most sinister purpose—for a prvileged ruling class—of forcing the poor population of London to accept the criminalization of customary rights and the new forms of private property. Necessity drove the city's poor into inevitable conflict with the changing property laws, such that all the working-class men and women of London had good reason to fear the example of Tyburn's Triple Tree.

The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution

Within the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century which resulted in the triumph of the protestant ethic - the ideology of the propertied class - there threatened another, quite different, revolution. Its success 'might have established communal property, a far wider democracy in political and legal institutions, might have disestablished the state church and rejected the protestant ethic. In "The World Turned Upside Down" Christopher Hill studies the beliefs of such radical groups as the Diggers, the Ranters, the Levellers and others, and the social and emotional impulses that gave rise to them. The relations between rich and poor classes, the part played by wandering 'masterless' men, the outbursts of sexual freedom, the great imaginative creations of Milton and Bunyan - these and many other elements build up into a marvellously detailed and coherent portrait of this strange, sudden effusion of revolutionary beliefs.

The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France And England, 1730-1848

'He put the mind back into history and restored the dignity of man.' --A J P Taylor

'It may seem incredible that nobody tried before to discover what sort of people actually stormed the Bastille, but Rude was the first to have done so....Like all his work, this book is concentrated, simple and clear, and admirably suited to the non-specialist reader.' --Eric Hobsbawm, New York Review of Books 

George Rudé was a prolific researcher and writer. Although he began his academic career at the age of fifty, he wrote some 15 books and edited several others. He was one of the leading practitioners of ‘history from below’ and his work influenced an entire generation of historians of the French Revolution.