Apparitional Blackness

My PhD was a creative nonfiction called ‘Northamptonshire’s Caribbean: A Ghost Story, Post-1940’, based on oral interviews and limited use of archives. Outside of major UK cities, there are fewer Caribbean-centred structures: Northampton is not London or Liverpool, and so, I was largely dependent on the fragile memories of my elders. ‘Apparitional Blackness’ theorises a nowhereness stuck between the city-focused histories of Black Britain 1 and other assumptions, be they in TV or academia, that treat Black regional experiences as present and historical impossibilities. I use ‘ghosts’ to illustrate absence as presence in what gets erased not only from UK Black pop culture but what remains obscured in much UK Black history research. Working in a discipline that sees our regionality as ‘too white’ for (City) Black history and ‘too rural’ for white spaces, this paper argues that, in the popular, there is a regional dis/appearing in ‘official’ documentation practices such as in archives and film. This paper combines my life with ghosts and literature to make sense of Black life in local history archives. In Northants, ghosts are the best measure of Black history. Here, they are common

Black British · Black history · Documentation · Oral history · White (mutation) · World history · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South African History and Culture