Passage to England

Barbadian Londoners Speak of Home

John Western (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

344 Seiten

1992
University of Minnesota Press (Verlag)
978-0-8166-1984-9 (ISBN)

Infos

Since World War II London has become a significantly multiracial city. Some of the earliest agents of its transformation were young men and women recruited in the late 1950s from Barbados, then a British colony, to work in the metropolis’s nationalized public transportation system and in its hospitals. These Barbadians met, married, settled in London, and raised Londoner children. In 1987-88 John Western conducted a series of interviews with twelve such families--both parents and children. Their vivid words fill A Passage to England with insight, human, and, often, poignancy. Here is a rich perspective on thirty years or more of London social history.





Western structured the interviews to allow the Barbadians a lot of freedom to discuss whatever came to mind concerning either their own life histories and achievements, or wider themes of culture, politics, and society. Topics covered range from matters of “race” to Margaret Thatcher and the change her decade in power has wrought in Britain. One development, for example, is the strikingly entrepreneurial spirit now embraced by some of the young British blacks, veritably “Mrs. Thatcher’s Children.” Ultimately, many of the interviewees focused on the changes they see in their ancestral island in the Caribbean, to which all of them have returned for visits. For this migrant generation especially, as the prospect of retirement begins to grow increasingly important, inevitable questions regard the definitions of “home” and “belonging” must be confronted: Does one stay in London--with one’s children and grandchildren--or does one return to Barbados, which for many seems no longer the same island as the one they left a working lifetime ago? Within the context of an ever-increasing complement of geographically mobile people worldwide, Western’s study provides unique insights into the particular ambiguities a particular set of person have wrestled with at a particular moment in history...but the import of the Barbadian Londoners’ story is universal.

Autor

John Western teaches at Syracuse University, where in 1987 he won the Daniel Patrick Moynihan social science award and in 1990 the College of Arts and Science’s prize for undergraduate teaching. In 1991 he won a Distinguished Teaching Achievement award from the National Council for Geographic Education. He previously taught at Temple and Ohio State universities, and is the author of Outcast Cape Town (Minnesota, 1981). Raised in England, he lived in Burundi, Canada, and South Africa before settling in the United States. A Passage to England is based upon fieldwork pursued while on leave at the London School of Economics in 1987-1988. Robert Coles is Norman Tishman Lecturer in Psychiatry at Harvard University and the author of Children of Crisis and The Spiritual Life of Children.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.3.1992
• Verlagsort: Minnesota
• Sprache: englisch
• Maße: 152 x 229 mm
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• ISBN-10: 0-8166-1984-0 / 0816619840
• ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-1984-9 / 9780816619849
• Zustand: Neuware