ABSTRACT
Urban Black theology is a contemporary political theology which prioritizes the translocal postcolonial experience of the Black Atlantic and Indian sub-continent diaspora as the foundation for theological reflection. While the primary context that gives it life is the experience of Black and Asian Britons, the secondary context of urban life provides the soil within which it continues to grow. Since the docking of the Empire Windrush in 1948 a large majority of Black and Asian Britons have lived in Britain’s largest cities, as Peter Fryer shows in his seminal book Staying Power. 1 Reddie has written about the way in which many “Black Churches” emerged in inner-city areas to serve the Black Christians in these communities. 2 While it is important to avoid the uncritical assumption that Black equals urban, the most recent National Census in Britain (2001) shows that the vast majority of Black and Asian Britons continue to live in the ten largest cities in Britain. 3 The life of the city provides an often under-acknowledged secondary context for contemporary urban Black theologies. The processes of urbanization and the globalizing reconfiguration of urban space have altered the fabric of city-living and, by extension the shape of Black and Asian communities in Britain. I do not claim that the city has become the defining context for urban Black theologies. Such a suggestion by a White urban theologian could easily carry unintended echoes of a patriarchal colonial past. What I do suggest is that the city has become the landscape on which urban Black theologies are fashioned. For too long Urban Liberation Theologies have neglected the witness of urban Black theology as a specific urban faith narrative or sidelined it as a distinct political theology. The future for theological reflection in an interwoven urban age must surely lie in the articulation of a networked urban theology of equals which embraces the fluid complexity of urban society.
