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Abstract

A longer version of this interview with A. Sivanandan by Kwesi Owusu was carried out in March 1998 for a reader on British Black Culture. The interviewee, a leading analyst on black politics, discusses: what in his Ceylonese (Sri Lankan) background had formed his outlook; why he came to the UK and what he found in 1958; the transformation of the establishment organisation the Institute of Race Relations, where he worked as librarian, in the context of 1960s’ liberatory politics; how Black became a political colour and how that broke down; his take on Enoch Powell; his view on Black culture and how it differed from that of people like cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall; the way forward for struggle under the then new prime minister Tony Blair.

Keywords

anti-fascism Black as a political colour colonialism Black culture communalism Enoch Powell Institute of Race Relations Notting Hill race relations Sivanandan Stuart Hall

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References

For A. Sivanandan’s work on race, culture and political economy see ‘The liberation of the black intellectual’ in his A Different Hunger (London: Pluto Press, 1982), pp. 82–98 and Communities of Resistance (Verso, 1990).

See Race and Resistance: the IRR story by Sivanandan

(IRR, 1974); also in Race & Class 50, no. 2 (2008).

See Sivanandan

, ‘Race, class and the state’, Race & Class 17, no. 4 (Spring 1976) and also in A Different Hunger, pp. 101–126.

See Sivanandan

, ‘Grunwick’, Race &Class 19, no. 1 (Summer 1977) and also in A Different Hunger, pp. 126–131. For more on the other strikes, see Sivanandan

, ‘From resistance to rebellion: Asian and Afro-Caribbean struggles in Britain’, Race & Class 23 (October 1981): pp. 111–152, also in A Different Hunger, pp. 3–54 and his Catching History on the Wing (Pluto, 2008).

See Athwal

Harmit

Bourne

Jenny

, eds, Dying for Justice (London: IRR, 2015).

In Owusu

Kwesi

, ed., Black British Culture and Society (London: Routledge, 2000).

See for example ‘New circuits of imperialism’, Race & Class 26, no. 1 (1984), and ‘Heresies and prophecies: the social and political fall-out of the technological revolution’, in Jim Davis, et al., eds, Cutting Edge (London: Verso, 1998). The novel on Sri Lanka by A. Sivanandan, When Memory Dies (London: Arcadia, 1997) was awarded the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region) and the Sagittarius Prize.

The struggle for a radical Black political culture: an interview with A. Sivanandan

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