ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the emergence of black British scholarship from the late 1970s to the 1990s. It focuses on what is sometimes termed black British cultural studies: the work of Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Hazel Carby and their contemporaries at the University of Birmingham's centre for contemporary cultural studies (CCCS), the literary theorist and historian David Dabydeen and others who reshaped academic disciplines. The chapter also focuses on the extent to which black cultural studies' fascination with the broader categories of 'black youth' and 'cultural identity' signalled a shift away from the positions established in the black Marxist analyses of schooling and social reproduction. The cultural theorists' innovations are another reminder of the breadth of black British contributions to the field of education. In the 1980s and 1990s the post-CCCS field pulled away from viewing schooling as the frontline of race in Britain. However, cultural studies were still influential on an important strand of educational research.