ABSTRACT
This chapter examines ways in which members of the 1980s black British jazz band the Jazz Warriors responded to their position and treatment within British society by expressing and renegotiating their racial identities through musical performance. It talks about 'black Britain' to refer chiefly to British Caribbeans, whose presence dates largely from around the Second World War. The chapter discusses fairly politicized and contested realm. The British jazz scene has some investment in maintaining its colour-blind ideal. The government's reaction was not as constructive. Continuing policies that were established after the First World War, they responded by effectively declaring the black population to be the source of white racism. The exclusion of blackness from English ethnicity is still central to British constructions of nationhood, as well as British black self-identification. An impressive range of literature in sociology, anthropology and philosophy has been written to address the issues of identity-formation, including the creation of national sentiment and nationalism.
