A Different Hunger

A. Sivanandan

Description

This collection of A. Sivanandan's writings looks at the history of black struggles against British racism from the 1940s to the uprisings of Brixton and Toxteth in the 1980s.
Introduction by Stuart Hall

1. From Resistance to Rebellion: Asian and Afro-Caribbean struggles in Britain

2. Black Power: The Politics of Existence

3. Huey Newton and the Black Renascence

4. The Passing of the King

5. Jonathan

6. Angela Davis

7. James Baldwin

8. The Colony of the Colonised

9. Paul Robeson

10. The Liberation of the Black Intellectual

11. Race, Class and the State

12. Grunwick

13. From Immigration Control to ‘Induced Repatriation’

14. Imperialism and Disorganic Development in the Silicon Age

15. Race, Class and Caste in South Africa

Sujets

• Science

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 mars 1991
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783718207
• Langue: English

Extrait

A Different Hunger
 
A. Sivanandan
A Different Hunger
Writings on Black Resistance
‘Theirs is a different hunger — a hunger to retain the freedom, the life-style, the dignity which they have carved out from the stone of their lives.’
 
First published in 1982 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London, N6 5AA
and 141 Old Bedford Road,
Concord, MA 01742, USA
Reprinted 1987, 1991
Copyright © A. Sivanandan 1982
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part by any means without prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN 9780861043712
ISBN 0861043715
ePub ISBN 9781783718207
Kindle ISBN 9781783718214
Printed and bound by
Antony Rowe Ltd, Eastbourne
 
Contents
 
Introduction by Stuart Hall
1.
Asian and Afro-Caribbean Struggles
 
 
From Resistance to Rebellion
2.
Black Power and Black Culture
 
 
Black Power: The Politics of Existence
 
 
Huey Newton and the Black Renascence
 
 
The Passing of the King
 
 
Jonathan
 
 
Angela Davis
 
 
James Baldwin
 
 
The Colony of the Colonised
 
 
Paul Robeson
 
 
The Liberation of the Black Intellectual
3.
The Black Experience in Britain
 
 
Race, Class and the State
 
 
Grunwick
 
 
From Immigration Control to ‘Induced Repatriation’
4.
Racism and Imperialism
 
 
Imperialism and Disorganic Development in the Silicon Age
 
 
Race, Class and Caste in South Africa
 
Introduction
by Stuart Hall
This collection of Sivanandan’s writings is long overdue. The majority of the essays were first published in Race & Class , the journal (published by the Institute of Race Relations) which he founded, edits and has sustained through thick and (mainly) thin times. For those who do not know, it is worth saying that he is one of the handful of key black intellectuals who has actively sustained the black struggle in Britain over more than two decades: partly in his writing and educational work; partly — and less visibly — in political interventions of a strategic kind; partly by his defence of the Institute as a base for active political work; and partly by his own considerable personal gifts and qualities. The so-called ‘unity of theory and practice’ has been frequently invoked on the left, but remains elusive. These essays represent something as closely approximating to that ideal as one is likely to find anywhere in recent British writing on the themes of black struggle.
The essays deserve to be better known. Many of them will be already familiar to those engaged in the politics of black resistance; though it is good to have them at last between single covers. They have acquired, indeed, a remarkable ‘underground reputation’: thumbed over, read and reread, argued about and debated wherever these issues are taken seriously. They have also, frequently, been plagiarized — which is its own kind of recognition: usually without acknowledgement, which seems to be the fate, not only of Siva’s work, but of the Institute — the first telephone number which journalists and other seekers after truth can find when in search of ‘the black connection’, and the name they find most difficult to recall when the credits and acknowledgements begin to roll.
Even amongst white activists who regard themselves as fully paid-up members of the anti-racist struggle, they are much less familiar than they deserve.
I doubt whether these are matters that keep Sivanandan awake at night. Indeed, I suspect they must be numbered amongst the many rich ironies of political struggle which he so deeply relishes and from which he has extracted so much humour over the years. This capacity to take some pleasure from the richly contradictory nature of black struggle in a white society is a quality which has infuriated numerous white audiences, and is not always well understood even amongst his friends and would-be supporters. The black cause, as we know, is a serious matter: hence black intellectuals are expected to be serious, noble and dignified at all times — above all, simple in their indignation. Sivanandan has, however, systematically refused to be ‘simple’ in this way. I have always regarded this complexity — in the best sense, his ‘doubleness’ — as a political, as well as a personal, strategy. Surrounded as he has been by the ambiguities, duplicities, the multiple masks of his so-called ‘host society’, Sivanandan has actively cultivated a number of appropriate personae . One face — extremely polite, especially when pointing out the contradictory toils in which the speaker is currently entwining himself: and full of a rich but cunning show of innocence — is sometimes turned to allies and enemies alike, ‘above ground’. Another — principled, militant, intransigent in opposition: yet gentle in personal relationship — is reserved for comrades and friends with whom he has become linked and bound in struggle, ‘below ground’. His enemies would be well advised not to mistake the one for the other.
The quality, however, which most distinguishes these essays is simply his capacity to go directly for the seminal issue, and to give that issue an original formulation. The essay on blacks and the state, for example, inserted the black question into the very centre of a growing and wide-ranging concern — novel at the time — with shifts in the strategy of the state. The formulation of the issues involved in the qualitative shift from ‘controls’ to ‘induced repatriation’ was so clarifying that it became the adopted wisdom overnight. It formed a watershed in the thinking about the structural position of blacks in Britain. The connections between blacks workers, the ‘new technology’ and the new international division of labour were powerfully posed in what for years remained as the only political discussion readily at hand. The analysis of such key struggles as Grunwick and the riots of Summer 1981 has become something of a test-case for political analysts of the left. Siva’s accounts are amongst the few which deserve to be preserved and which stand re-reading years after. These and other pieces in the collection are focussed by the imperatives of struggle; they bring ideas to bear on clarifying its perspectives; and they flow back into the strategies of struggle. Few writers can claim to have approached so clearly the organic connection between analysis and practice, which is the hallmark of the political intellectual.
Those involved in or committed to these struggles will, therefore, have much to gain from reading or re-reading these essays. But — historical memories being so short — it is worth reminding them of the story of how the base for this kind of work was laid. Behind these essays lies the history of the Institute itself: the focal point for ‘race relations’ research in the early days; then, like CARD (the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination), polarized and fractured by the growing politicization of black struggle in the 1960s; the critical moment when the ‘race relations industry’ was first identified, and its project analysed — these are crucial moments, at each of which Sivanandan played a critical role. Few know the story of how he simply hijacked the Institute from under their very noses; took the material resources (books, journals, pamphlets, filing cards and connections) which he has helped, painfully, to accumulate, packed them up, and walked out with them, as it were, under his arm; transferring them to a less salubrious and less respectable part of town, bearing the official title (to the establishment’s intense annoyance) with him, to a base where the brothers and sisters had a far better idea what to do with them than those he had left behind. Few librarians have achieved so striking — and brazen — an appropriation/expropriation of the tools and materials of their trade! It was an inspired act of piracy which should illuminate our path and deserves to be regularly celebrated: revealing an impeccable sense of the moment, and an instinctive set of priorities; above all, thoroughly characteristic.
These are papers and essays ‘from the front line’. I greatly envy those who are about to encounter them for the first time.
 
I would like to thank the Transnational Institute, Washington, for their support during the writing of some of these pieces.
A. Sivanandan
 
Part One:
Asian and Afro-Caribbean Struggles in Britain
 
From Resistance to Rebellion
On 25 June 1940 Udham Singh was hanged. At a meeting of the Royal Asiatic Society and the East India Association at Caxton Hall, London, he had shot dead Sir Michael O’Dwyer, who (as the Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab) had presided over the massacre of unarmed peasants and workers at Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar, in 1919. Udham was a skilled electrician, an active trade unionist and a delegate to the local trades council, and, in 1938, had initiated the setting up of the first Indian Workers’ Association, in Coventry.
In October 1945 at Chorlton Town Hall in Manchester the fifth Pan-African Congress, breaking with its earlier reformism, pledged itself to fight for the ‘absolute and complete independence’ of the colonies and an end to imperialism, if need be through Gandhian methods of passive resistance. Among the delegates then resident in Britain were Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, George Padmore, Wallace-Johnson, C.L.R. James and Ras Makonnen. W.E.B. DuBois, who had founded the Pan-African Congress in America in 1917, presided.
In September 1975 three young West Indians held up a Knightsbridge restaurant for the money that would help set up proper schools for the black community, finance black political groups and assist the liberation struggles in Africa.
Of such strands have black struggles in Britain been woven. But their pattern was set on the loom of British racism.
In the early period of post-war reconstruction, when Britain, like all European powers, was desperate for labour, racialism operated on a free market basis — adjusting it