CANCELLED: An Inconvenient Presence: Black History and the White Fury of Ethnic Nationalism Seminar

This Black History Month, we hope to supplement ongoing events representing black history in modern Britain with a conversation that interrogates how the inclusion of blackness in British history is grudgingly received. The aim is to go beyond discussions of inclusion to think about the cultural processes of exclusion and othering at play in the contemporary world.

Many reactions to the discovery of what Cheddar Man might have looked like impose ideas about ‘race’ and the nation (i.e. Englishness/Britishness) onto pre-history. These often represent racialized ideas about the nation: a form of ethnic nationalism. To understand them, it is useful to put them into context. This short presentation will seek to sketch out some of the historical contexts for angry white responses to a piece of archaeological research connected to a historic find in south-west England, while also trying to place them within the wider contemporary context of a resurgent ethnic nationalism that goes well beyond the shores of ‘Brexit Britain’.