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Matt Cook and Lisa Palmer present 2 papers; one explores queer social scenes in England in the 1960s, and the other exploring Caribbean young people's engagement with Black radical thought and activism during the 1970s .
Local matters: queer scenes in 1960s
In this paper I explore queer social scenes in three very different urban areas in England in the 1960s. Drawing chiefly on oral history testimonies, I show how different local identities, demographics, geographies and socio-economic circumstances affected queer experience in the resort town of Brighton, in naval Plymouth, and in industrial Manchester. Locality matters, I argue, and taking it seriously allows us to further question the pervasiveness of the sixties swing and the cultural dominance of sixties London.
Matt Cook
Matt Cook is professor of modern history at Birkbeck, University of London. He is a cultural historian specializing in the history of sexuality and the history of London in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is author of London and the Culture of Homosexuality (2003) and Queer Domesticities (2014) and editor of a number collections – most recently: Queer Interiors (2017) (with Andrew Gorman Murray). He is currently working on projects on the AIDS crisis, on queer community and local history, and on writing queer history.
Caribbean young people during the 1970s
Caribbean young people during the 1970s pursued their own avenues of learning through their engagement with Black radical thought and activism. Using archival sources, this paper will focus on how these important intellectual social movements in Britain more generally and Handsworth specifically, converged and diverged with British sociological studies on ‘race relations’ and with the counter-hegemonic archival practices of the photographer, Vanley Burke. Burke’s photography and archive not only engages with the politics of creating alternative cites of knowledge production, they also enable us to map, trace and reconstruct some of these important sites of Black intellectual life in Britain.
Lisa Amanda Palmer
Lisa Amanda Palmer is the Programme Director for Black Studies Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Birmingham City University. She is the co-author of Blackness in Britain and her research specialises in the field of Black popular culture, lovers’ rock music, black feminism, community archiving and heritage, and the cultural politics of decoloniality.