racial otherness – Gilroy studied the importance of black representation. The ‘ There ain’t no black in the Union Jack relates back to the race relations from the Second World war. Thus where the poster-war wave of immigration from the West Indies produced a series of worries and anxieties regarding immigrant behaviour. The black community are constructed as a racial ‘other’ in the predominantly white world of 1950s Britain. There were worries that immigrant communities would swamp / take over white Britain. These fears were further noted in the news in late 1970s and 1980s and routed the black community with assaults, muggings and other violent crimes. The study was called “There Ain’t No Black In The Union Jack” where he focused on how newspapers were lurid and racist towards black people.
Post-colonial Melancholia: Racial representations were “fixed in a matrix between the imagery of squalor and that of sordid sexuality” Gilroy argued that this was gated the black community out by saying they are a “other” race in the majority white Britain. The story of UK race relations post W.W. 2 : In 1950’s, the black community such as Indians and the Caribbean came to England as ‘we’ were in desperate need of filled job spaces.
The story of UK race relations post W.W. 2: After Gilroy’s study of how black people and immigrants where being pushed aside by people instead of being included and recognised. After that, 2 decades later, Britain was flooded with “fear” that immigrants and other races were going to “swamp” Britain.
Legacy of the Empire : Gilroy suggests that we live in ‘morbid culture of a once-imperial nation that has not been able to accept its inevitable loss of prestige’. England couldn’t accept the fact that it was loosing its empire power.
the search for albion – albionic nostalgia is a representation of Englishness that id marked by nostalgia and generally produces a whitewashed version of an idealised/ imagined a rural England.
BBC information on Ghost Town “Released on 20 June 1981 against a backdrop of rising unemployment, its blend of melancholy, unease and menace took on an entirely new meaning when Britain’s streets erupted into rioting almost three weeks later – the day before Ghost Town reached number one in the charts.” sums up the idea behind Ghost Town.
Info from TheConversation.com:
Ghost Town’: a haunting 1981 protest song that still makes sense today
It was their last song before splitting up and reforming as The Special AKA and stayed at the top of the UK charts for three weeks.
The music video was directed by Barney Bubbles and filmed in the East End of London, Blackwell Tunnel and a before-hours City of London.