Teaching Black London in Pandemic Paris
- Laura Carter
- 10 hours ago
- 7 min read
This piece is the fourth in a series of essays on teaching British history outside the Anglophone academy, a topic that challenges our preconceptions of where British history is being taught and who it is for. As higher education in the US undergoes systematic attack by the federal government, this series also gives insight into how and under what circumstances it is possible for US-trained academics to find work elsewhere.
I moved to Paris in the strange in-between-time that was the late summer of 2020, freshly recruited into my first permanent academic job at Université Paris Cité. I was both delighted and daunted by the international move, the language, and by the looming shadow of Covid. Nonetheless I began planning my courses for September with purpose, for we were also at the end of a summer of important Black Lives Matter protests in the UK, and I believed teaching was one way I could make a contribution. I decided to design a course, in English, on Black British history for French second-year undergraduates, focusing on the lives and experiences of African-Caribbean people in London since the nineteenth century. The syllabus can found at the bottom of this piece. The course ran for two years of partial-online teaching during the pandemic, and two back in the Parisian seminar room. These ever-changing and ever-challenging contexts redefined my approach to the subject, which had until that point been formed by my training and everyday life in Britain.
I had never taught Black British history before, but my confidence had been bolstered by the mass of online material that exploded onto our laptop screens around that time and by my research on race and multiculturalism in UK secondary education since 1945. Still, my initial efforts were hugely naive. What I ended up doing that first autumn was teaching black history via Zoom to a series of small black squares on a screen, digital proxies for young people whose faces I could not see, whose lives I did not understand, and frankly whose grasp of the English language, let alone of British history, I had no way to gauge. I was well read and well prepared, but I came to the job with an experiential deficit: because I am white and because I’m not French. I would come to learn that I had a very mixed cohort before me, particularly students with North and West African heritage, reflecting the composition of the wider Ile-de-France region and France’s colonial past.
My starting point for designing the course was Sadiah Qureshi’s clear and practical 2020 blog on "Teaching Black and South Asian British Histories.” Qureshi emphasizes the importance of the long durée and using case studies. I leaned heavily into case studies, especially biographies, which became the focus of my students’ final oral presentations. With little prior knowledge of British history, they were better able to grasp the course’s core themes when contained in a life. I was careful to introduce celebrated and uncelebrated figures, and to interrogate the tendency to celebrate the “first black X” (for example in an oral comprehension exercise on this BBC podcast interview with Viv Anderson).
Over the four years, the most popular biographies were Linton Kwesi Johnson and Yvonne Conolly (who died in 2021). The former did not surprise me, as we did a close reading of New Crass Massakah (1981). But Conolly’s placement reveals how much our analysis of the British education system resonated. For French students not long out of high school, maybe studying schools, teachers, and curricula felt closer to home than Notting Hill and the NHS. We had no “Great Men” epidemics because the course content is skewed towards black women’s voices and experiences, and my cohorts are predominantly female.
I fretted for a while that this was all too basic and too far from my historical training. But for students broaching the contested, alternative history of a city most had never visited, in a second language, I realized that it was okay to start with people and their stories, building out from there.
Each year I would temporarily forget and re-remember that my Parisian cohorts were students of Britain, but they were not from Britain (like me). One of my primary ambitions was to problematise Windrush as the starting point of Black British history. This was not successful, perhaps because my desire to deconstruct Windrush was predicated on the idea that it had been constructed in the first place. But in fact these young people don’t live in a culture saturated with the Windrush narrative. I had to keep reminding them what Windrush was, whilst they expressed no notable surprise, although much interest, at Caroline Bressey’s work on black Victorians.
On the other hand, my students did come to this course with an uncomplicated notion of British “multiculturalism” as a fixed and self-evident aspect of Anglo-Saxon culture, a neat and binary opposite to French “assimilation.” We therefore worked hard to unpack multiculturalism, to understand it as an object of critique first from within the Black British community itself. Particularly useful here were a set of testimonies contained in the Swann Report (1985), in which young people educated in British schools comment on their experiences of “multicultural education” in the 1970s and 1980s.
As my time in Paris continued I came to observe the social dyanmics at play, from afar. The far right are on the ascent in French politics and immigration a core issue, but “race” is not a sanctioned topic in the same way as it has now become in (some) UK history classrooms. French police have been gaining greater powers in recent years, often directing them at young people in Paris and its suburbs, where many of my students commute from. In the summer of 2023 Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old of Algerian descent, was murdered by French police in the suburb of Nanterre, sparking protests and uprisings. President Macron skirted the surface in a speech in Algeria in August 2022 with his reference to “questions of memory” (which we studied). But the first time I heard immigration and France’s history discussed frankly was in a talk by the French MP, Estelle Youssouffa, in June 2023. Youssouffa represents Mayotte, one of France’s "outre-mer" départements.
Although I became more informed and aware year on year, the biggest challenge of this course was always positionality. I began by acknowledging my own positionality as a white female teacher, but in the early years of anonymous zoom seminars this was at best awkward and at worst harmful without the space for interaction and discussion. In the first two years, “feelings” accumulated in their submitted essays, whether guilt, anger, or both. I built a class diary into their assessed work, in which students articulate their own positionality and share their subjective responses to sources.
Reviewing the 2023 and 2024 class diaries, students managed to reflect on how their own backgrounds shaped their responses to the material. White students acknowledged privilege and ignorance, whilst historical episodes of discrimination and negotiating diasporic identities resonated with those of immigrant heritage. The 1981 New Cross massacre affected students most profoundly, perhaps because it took the lives of young people at the same age and stage of life as themselves.
A couple of students expressed frustration with the course’s framing: “…this class feels like a ‘Introduction to racism and how black people live with it’,” “I feel like asking the question of why we should study black British history is not important.” Clearly my attempt to decentre racism and centre activism was imperfect. Students found the framework of institutional vs. individual racism, drawn from Stokely Carmichael’s 1967 speech in London, particularly useful in connecting historical issues to contemporary ones. On reflection this should have come earlier than seminar six. I have learnt that keeping the political stakes of Black Britishness at the fore requires constant vigilance.
This autumn we are introducing a new curriculum, meaning “Black London” will not run again in the same form; instead I hope to re-work aspects of the course into project work and co-taught, comparative modules. I will also take forward these lessons: teaching Black British history reframes British history as global, but teaching it in France can also close off well-worn, metropolitan francophone pathways into understanding Britain, such as the notion of a consensual and celebratory multiculturalism. It can also create a salutary space for talking about race in a way that feels safer for French students because they are talking about Britain, and not about France. “Black London” is a complicated world to make sense of from the Parisian seminar (or Zoom) room. As is often the case, I’ve learnt as much from my students than they did from me over the past four years, and I thank them for working with me on this project.
Laura Carter is an historian of modern Britain whose research focuses on education, gender, and social change in the twentieth century. She is the author of Histories of Everyday Life: The Making of Popular Social History in Britain, 1918-1979 (OUP, 2021) and co-editor, with Freddy Foks and Phil Harling, of Democratising History: Modern British History Inside and Out (University of London Press, 2025). She teaches at Université Paris Cité in Paris, France and is a member of the research laboratory ECHELLES.
The views and opinions expressed in this post are solely those of the original author/s and do not necessarily represent the views of the North American Conference on British Studies. The NACBS welcomes civil and productive discussion in the comments below. Our blog represents a collegial and conversational forum, and the tone for all comments should align with this environment. Insulting or mean comments will not be tolerated and NACBS reserves the right to delete these remarks and revoke the commenter’s site membership.
Comments