This address to a conference on ‘the exotic’ in nineteenth-century drama examines the cultural impact of slavery, and the resistances to it, on the English cultural imagination. From her perspective as both a researcher and a long-standing member of the Institute of Race Relations’ staff, the author explores the persistence of such an impact, and relates it both to the present day, and a key period of attempted cultural/political transformation, the 1970s.
CarmichaelStokelyHamiltonCharles V.Black Power: the politics of liberation in America (New York, Vintage Books, 1967).
2.
Quoted in BoswellJames, Life of Johnson (Oxford, OUP World’s Classics, 1989), p. 876.
3.
For an account of the debate, see AmbarSaladin M., ‘Malcolm X at the Oxford Union’, Race & Class (Vol. 53, no. 4, April–June2012).
4.
SivanandanA., ‘Challenging racism: strategies for the 1980s’, Communities of Resistance: writings on black struggles for socialism (London, Verso, 1990), p. 64.
5.
See LindforsBernth, Ira Aldridge: the early years, 1807–1833 (New York, University of Rochester Press, 2011), p. 91.
6.
KurnikMax, quoted in LindforsBernth, Ira Aldridge: performing Shakespeare in Europe, 1852–1855 (New York, University of Rochester Press, 2013), pp. 96–7.
7.
Belfast Daily Mercury (13December1856).
8.
BurroughBrian, Days of Rage: America’s radical underground, the FBI and the forgotten age of revolutionary violence (New York, Penguin Press, 2015).
