Season 2, Episode 3: What it means to be Black in the Union Jack
Season 2, Episode 3: What It Means to Be Black in the Union Jack
In this episode, edna bonhomme and Dr. Christienna Fryar discuss the history of Britain and the Caribbean and what it means to be teaching 500 years of Black British history in Britain. Recognizing that Black British history has only recently started to gain institutional support in the British academy, Dr. Fryar puts institutional practices in context, addressing how history departments have for so long separated the colonial history of the British Empire from British domestic history as well as marginalized histories of migration within the UK and the intellectual contributions of Black Britons. Sharing her work on Jamaica post-emancipation and Britain after the abolition of slavery in 1834, Dr. Fryar refutes the national myth of a “humanitarian” Britain after abolition by exposing ongoing racism and the violence of imperial expansion after the end of slavery. Linking this myth and the academic divide between British imperial and domestic histories to present-day realities in the Caribbean and for Black Britons, especially in reference to the recent Windrush crisis, Dr. Fryar addresses what is at stake when the colonial past and its aftermath are not fully accounted for.
Transcriptions for all episodes are available upon request.
Biography
Dr. Christienna Fryar
Dr. Christienna Fryar is a historian of Britain and the Caribbean, focusing on Britain's imperial entanglements in the Caribbean region. Her work embeds modern British history within the fields of comparative slavery and emancipation, and she is finishing a book about disaster politics and imperial governance in postemancipation Jamaica. She occasionally comments—usually on Twitter—about the state of higher education in the US and the UK. She is also a 2020 AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker.
Bibliography
Fryar, Christienna. “The Narrative of Ann Pratt: Life-Writing, Genre and Bureaucracy in a Postemancipation Scandal,” History Workshop Journal 85 (Spring 2018): 265–279.
Fryar, Christienna. “The Work of Disappointment,” critical essay on Yarimar Bonilla. In Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015) in Small Axe 21, no. 2 (July 2017): 193–200.
Fryar, Christienna. “Imperfect Models: The Kingston Lunatic Asylum Scandal and the Problem of Postemancipation Imperialism,” Journal of British Studies 55, no. 4 (Oct. 2016): 709–727.
Fryar, Christienna. “The Moral Politics of Cholera in Postemancipation Jamaica,” Slavery & Abolition 34, no. 4 (2013): 598–618.
Fryar, Christienna. “Decolonising History: Enquiry and Practice,” conversation roundtable piece with Amanda Behm, Emma Hunter, Elisabeth Leake, Su Lin Lewis, and Sarah Miller-Davenport, History Workshop Journal 89 (Spring 2020): 169–191.
Show credits
Interviews
edna bonhomme
editing / Post-production
edna bonhomme
Assistance
Kristyna Comer
Music
NALALIONGIRL (442612, Attribution License, Creative Commons) and X3nus (450539, Attribution License, Creative Commons)