Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain

"The book operates on many levels—it’s a history of the Newham Monitoring Project, it’s a theory of cultural anthropology, it’s an indictment of the British state’s maintenance of institutional racism, and it’s a call to '[show] up and…forge solidarities that do not as yet exist'...Ambikaipaker’s writing is compelling, his theoretical grounding is thorough, his empathy is apparent, and the fieldwork underpinning it is considerable and consequential."—Lateral

"Mohan Ambikaipaker has written an important book that foregrounds the experience of the black community in Britain fighting for racial justice, while caught between the racist violence of white British society and institutional discrimination. Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain makes it impossible to explain away such experiences as individual or episodic. It provides a rich theory to shine a light on the roots of racism that are in permanent contradiction with the stated aims of British liberal governance. Finally, it provides a new angle on the strategy of political blackness employed by Newham Monitoring Project in anti-racist campaigns that is generative of potential ways that solidarity between different black British communities can be forged in the future."—LSE Review of Books

"Mohan Ambikaipaker's book is a perceptive, moving, and captivating ethnography of an antiracist organization that monitors police abuse in London, an astute analysis of the ways in which the War on Terror proceeds from distinctly racialized assumptions and presumptions, and a profound rumination on the contradictions that make racial identities both fixed and fugitive, both foregrounded and furtive. Its imagination, insight, and eloquence make Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain a most memorable and meaningful book."—George Lipsitz, author of How Racism Takes Place

"Mohan Ambikaipaker's important and fascinating ethnography presents a nuanced account of the complexities of racial formation and discrimination in Britain, shedding light on perspectives rarely found either in the mainstream press or in scholarly works. The book provides powerful insights into racialized politics in twenty-first-century Britain."—Kathleen D. Hall, University of Pennsylvania