Belonging in Southall 1948-1991: from the politics of empire to the politics of blackness

Southall, located on the outskirts of West London, was transformed by immigration from the New Commonwealth in the second half of the 20th century. This dissertation will track the shifting ways that belonging was negotiated by this migrant community, drawn principally from Punjab in India, and their British-born children. The arrival of this migrant community in Southall mirrored Britain’s own transition from empire to nation. As a result, the initial generation of men who moved from Punjab spoke of their belonging in Britain in largely imperial terms. As immigration law changed in the 1960s, so did the composition of this migrant community. Families began to settle and made demands of both national and local government. Housing and education became key battlegrounds over belonging in Southall, and more broadly in a post-imperial Britain. The Southall Riots in 1979 shot the locality to national prominence. In the process, it gave a voice to a new black politics that emerged amongst a younger British born population. As the campaigns of the Southall Black Sisters would demonstrate in the 1980s, claims of a unified black community should be treated with scepticism. Blackness in Southall was a diverse politics of belonging