Note

In this study, the issue of upper-case B or lower-case b in the writing of the word ‘Black/black’ is of some importance. The use of the word ‘black’ as an adjective, noun, or racial descriptive has a history marked by contention and strategizing. There is, firstly, the matter of identifying a single word to effectively describe what is in effect a disparate range of groups and individuals. Secondly there is the equally vexing issue of the continuing evolution of the word ‘black’ and the continued ways in which it means different things to different people. To these issues can be added the matter of whether or not the word ‘black’ should be capitalized.

In a footnote to her foreword to the catalogue accompanying the ICA exhibition Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire (1995), Gilane Tawadros signalled the editorial and curatorial struggles that had revolved around ‘the use of the word black and indeed its spelling.’¹ Tawadros and her colleagues were faced with the task of collectively describing a particularly disparate grouping of artists. As Tawadros wrote, ‘One contentious issue raised many times within this publication is the use of the word black and indeed its spelling. Many terms or expressions could have been used throughout this publication. The general editorial position has been to use the term ‘black’ (with a lower case b) as referring to peoples of African, Asian, South East Asian, Latino (Puerto Rican, Mexican, Cuban) or Native American descent.’²

This particular study – Black Artists in British Art - has also used ‘Black’, but with an upper case B, to refer to individuals and communities of African, African-Caribbean and South Asian background, though as Gen Doy has noted, “Black with an upper case B has tended to be used to refer to Black as a proudly chosen identity, history and culture associated with African roots, distinguishing the term from a simple adjective ‘black’ describing colour.”³

To a certain extent, the British use of the term ‘Black’ takes its cue from an earlier, American usage. In the US, Black, as a designation for Americans of African descent, became both widely used and accepted in the 1960s and 1970s, supplanting the somewhat discredited and archaic term ‘Negro’. As with ‘Negro’, spelled with a capital N, there were those who insisted on, or preferred to capitalize, ‘Black’, regarding such an act as both a statement of empowerment and a demand for respect. Unlike the US however, ‘black’/’Black’ now exists, in Britain, within a largely accepted trans-racial usage, perhaps akin to the term ‘AfroAsian’ championed by Rasheed Araeen.

Emphatic determinations of these intriguing matters continue to evade us, particularly when ‘black’/’Black’ year on year, gains ever-greater complexities. In recent years, the term ‘ethnic minority’ has given way to ‘minority ethnic’, which in turn has evolved into the arguably particularly peculiar term BME – Black and Minority Ethnic. Several decades ago, certain Black people happily described themselves (and were in turn described) as ‘coloured’. A somewhat generational shift saw the introduction of the term ‘Afro-Caribbean’, which in turn gave way to ‘Black’, and ‘African-Caribbean’. In some instances, these designations were loaded with particular nuances when coming from spaces such as governmental bureaucracy or journalistic designation. (Few people, one imagines, would describe themselves as BME, unless required to do so on such things as censuses or monitoring forms). But when coming from a space of personal, individual or group empowerment, terms such as Black were, and indeed are, loaded with altogether different, though not uncomplicated, nuances.

The reader will likely notice that, throughout this text, I choose to write ‘Black’ with a capital B and this has been retained throughout, except in direct quotations in which the word ‘Black’ or ‘black’ has been left as it was originally written.