Introduction: Marking Race in Twentieth Century British History.

How might historians narrate Britain's past if we centre imperial racial formation and its contestations? The thirtieth anniversary of Paul Gilroy's There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation provided an opportunity for a new generation of scholars to consider the frameworks of race in British history. In 1987, Gilroy challenged Marxist approaches that treated race as secondary to or even a mechanistic expression of class inequality. He showed that the failure to account for race and empire positioned racialized subjects as perpetual outsiders.

The Sights and Sounds of State Violence: Encounters with the Archive of David Oluwale.

This article dwells in the archive documenting the existence of David Oluwale, a Nigerian-born British citizen whose life is captured historically by way of his encounters with the state. Working within and against the dynamics of violation, racialization, and dispossession structuring his archival presence, this article looks to the visual and sonic registers of an archive of Black dispossession to excavate histories of anti-Black state violence in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century. Likewise, it considers the extent to which an archive steeped in Black dispossession might offer possibilities for imagining Black emotive lives and constructing histories of Black sentience and affect even as they are produced in the context of racialized violence and duress.

Marking Race: Empire, Social Democracy, Deindustrialization.

This joint-authored essay concludes the thematic issue 'Marking Race'. Drawing on the authors' individual essays and reviewing the wider literatures in the field of race and immigration, imperialism and decolonization, social democracy and the welfare state, and deindustrialization, the essay makes a series of proposals about what an analytical focus on race adds to our understanding of modern British history.