Darcus Howe

This is a long overdue and badly needed biographical portrait of the black Trinidadian political radical and broadcaster Darcus Howe, who as one of the leading ideological agitators of the British Black Power Movement made a critical contribution to the shaping of modern multiracial and multicultural ‘postcolonial’ Britain after his arrival in the ‘Mother Country’ in 1961. Howe’s life is a rich one and well-lived: from birth in colonial Trinidad in 1943 as a teenaged campaigner for ‘West Indian self-government’ in Eric William’s People’s National Movement, to someone who, after making the move to Britain as an aspiring 18-year-old law student, as his biographers Robin Bunce and Paul Field note, ‘made Britain his home, fighting all the while for immigrants to enjoy the full rights of citizenship without having to renounce their history or identity: to integrate on their own terms’ (p. 2). Bunce and Field detail how Howe, following in the footsteps of his great uncle and mentor, the Trinidadian Marxist historian C.L.R. James, intellectually fused ‘English and Caribbean radicalism’, noting that in the face of the British colonial myth of the ‘civilizing mission’, ‘Howe and the Black Power Movement would civilize Britain by challenging the state-licensed barbarism of the Metropolitan Police (Met), by teaching Britain to become a harmonious multiracial society through bringing “reason to race” ’ (p. 2). The pioneering efforts of Bunce and Field, undertaken in close collaboration with Howe himself and his partner, Leila Hassan, mean that for the first time the essential facts of Howe’s life and work are presented in one volume, complete with some remarkable photographs. At least some aspects of the fascinating, gripping, and often inspiring record of activism and campaigning that emerges will doubtless be new to the vast majority of readers, and the authors are to be commended for making this such an accessible and readable narrative that illuminates the wider civil rights and black liberation struggle in Britain

Art history · Barbarism · Citizenship · Colonialism · Ideology · Multiculturalism · Political science · Politics · Portrait · Power (physics · Sociology · Australian History and Society · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Gender Studies · History · Law