Black Star: Britain's Asian Youth Movements

by Anandi Ramamurthy

Black Star documents the vibrant Asian Youth Movements in 1970s and 80s Britain who struggled against the racism of the street and the state. Anandi Ramamurthy shows how they drew inspiration from Black Power movements as well as anti-imperialist and workers' struggles across the globe.

Drawing on her intimate knowledge and extensive research, Ramamurthy shows how the struggle to make Britain 'home' led to a broad-based identity where 'black' was a political colour inspiring unity amongst all those struggling against racism.

Ramamurthy documents how by the late 1980s this broad based black identity disintegrated as Islamophobia became a new form of racism. In the process the legacy of the Asian Youth Movements has been largely hidden. Black Star retrieves this history and demonstrates its importance for political struggles today.

Genres: Politics, History

240 pages, Paperback

First published September 3, 2013

Reviews

[Somia · Rating 4 out of 5]

RTC

[didi · Rating 5 out of 5]

we began to see Bradford in some ways disintegrate... Bradford Twelve had galvanised a generation, it politicised us, it brought out some of the politics around cooption.... when we visited Bradford AYM we saw that they’d got this youth centre where they’d taken the posters of the martyrs off the walls because they had been given saunas and weight training rooms and some of these people began to dress in three piece suits.

[E · Rating 5 out of 5]

An really necessary piece of history, with excellent primary sources and analysis to boot. If you want to know what a "grassroots" resistance looks like (and how it is ignored by some, and eventually subverted and destroyed), look no further. AYMs across Britain were truly necessary, and used creative resistance tactics to defend and celebrate their communities.

[Alfie Hancox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, extremely important book, capturing the vibrant but little-known history of political, anti-imperialist activity among Britain's Asian communities. In highlighting this, Ramamurthy adds crucial context to the British state's policy of repression and vilification of Asian communities, under the rubric of the "war on terror".

Especially welcome was how Ramamurthy, in stark contrast to Satnam Virdee's recent study of race and class in Britain, doesn't gloss over the shortcomings of the white left's response to the AYMs. Drawing on oral testimony, she shows how especially Trotskyists alienated Asian radicals with their opportunistic "recruitment raids", and superficial charges of "black separatism". It is vital the left today learn from these past errors if it hopes to build a broad movement against capitalism...