Nationalist Emergency: Racial Outsiders, Class Struggle and Renewing Resistance

Conversation with Dr Adam Elliott-Cooper:

Nationalist Emergency: Racial Outsiders, Class Struggle and Renewing Resistance

Friday 30 January, 1pm - 2pm 

Seminar Room 63, Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities

All Welcome

As flags are raised on British streets and nationalism reasserts itself as common sense, the question of where to look for hope becomes newly urgent. This paper turns first to the past: to the Black Power movement who resisted street racism in the 1970s, and to the Black and Asian youth of British towns who, in the 1980s and 2000s, faced down racist mobs and indifference alike. The legacy of Britain’s Black Power Movement—organised, insistent, internationalist—runs through these histories of defiance. Yet the argument is not confined to retrospection. It looks toward the present, to the fragile coalitions of urban multicultures, experiments in electoral reform, and a revived politics of grassroots dissent. Taken together, these offer not nostalgia but the possibility of remaking what class struggle, conviviality and anti-fascism mean in contemporary Britain.

Biography: 

Adam Elliott-Cooper is a senior lecturer in social and public policy in the Department of Politics and IR, Queen Mary University of London. His first monograph, Black Resistance to British Policing, was published by Manchester University Press in May 2021. He is also co-author of Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State (Pluto Press, 2021). Adam sits on the board of The Monitoring Group, an anti-racist organisation challenging state racisms and racial violence.