Imperial/Post-imperial London and Black Atlantic Intellectual Histories

During the decades straddling decolonization, London was a nexus of anticolonialist dissidents and a locus of migration from Africa and the Caribbean. It was also a center of black intellectual production. Despite the growth or resurgence of imperial and international/transnational studies in recent years, imperial and intellectual history—and within the latter, European and black Atlantic (or Afro-Caribbean or African) intellectual histories—remain putatively separate fields of inquiry and historiographical debate. However, an analysis of the transatlantic circulation of intellectuals and ideas, as well as where and how they converged around particular sites and issues in the late/post-imperial metropolis, reveals the mutual imbrication of their trajectories.

This paper explores the connections between London and the History Department at the University of the West Indies, Mona, through the lives of three Afro-Caribbean women—Elsa V. Goveia, Lucille Mathurin Mair, and Jessica Huntley. They met as undergraduate history students at the University College of London, joined the West Indian Students Unions, and remained connected to the city’s Afro-Caribbean community through both this group and the later Caribbean Artists Movement. Questions and concerns facing Britain’s colonial holdings in the Caribbean as they looked toward a post-independence future informed their innovative historiographical interventions, but so too did the state of imperial history in Britain and the black intellectuals they encountered in London.  Through a brief sketch of these three women’s overlapping activities, I hope to trace some of the broader connections between the development of imperial and Caribbean history in the UK and Caribbean.