ABSTRACT
I want to think about Black culture and identity as organized around its own sense of frontlines and backyards. I am fully aware that it is dangerous to take this idea for a walk and there are many aspects I will not have time to deal with. I am aware that there is a lot invested in these terms and that to begin to describe the culture one inhabits is already to have set up a certain object of desire. I am going to take the risk of saying that I think that something as distinctive as a new ethnicity, a new Black British identity is emerging, and I want briefly to try to sketch its lineaments.
