Writing

Peer-reviewed academic writing

“Showing Up America”: Performing Race and Nation in Britain Before the First World War, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 2022.

This article examines American travel and performance in Britain in the decades prior to the First World War, arguing that the expression of nationality in this transatlantic context played a profound role in formulating both America’s dominant culture and a culture of opposition advanced by African American performers. It explores this “oppositional” culture in detail, focusing on the transatlantic work of Ida B. Wells and the Fisk Jubilee Singers. 

The article makes two arguments: first, that in the decades after emancipation, African American performers used travel, work and reception in Britain to put forward an alternative conception of national identity that was founded in racial equality and democracy. By redeploying the dominant symbols and practices of American culture abroad, they staked a claim to, rather than attempted to refute, their own Americanness. Second, it shows that these efforts, while significant, were limited in impact. Because these performers did not enjoy the same economic and political support as practitioners of America’s emerging ‘mass culture’, they depended on Britain, itself an imperial power with a historically antagonistic relationship with the United States, to validate their culture. This over-reliance hindered the domestic impact of their work. 

‘Five goals, no boots’: an interrogation of the politics, play and racialised athleticism of late colonial football tours to England, 1949–1959', Sport in History, 2018.

This article focuses on a series of five association football (soccer) tours from Britain’s colonies in Africa and Caribbean to England between 1949-1959. This period witnessed the final crumbling of the British Empire’s legitimacy as a cultural as well as political project, and the touring teams became increasingly attuned to their place within this pivotal moment in history. 

While British organisers intended these tours to reflect the ‘civilizing mission’ of imperialism and in the process bring together colony and metropole, both the athletes and the public reaction to the tours complicated this mission. In British newspaper reports, athletes from Nigeria, Ghana and Uganda were characterized as benefitting from ‘innate’ biological endowments, while footballers from the Caribbean were stereotyped as undisciplined and lazy. As well as a site where racial prejudices were projected, the spectacle of sporting activity played an active role in racializing non-white athletes for British audiences. However, it also provided an opportunity for Black footballers to subvert, challenge and reshape the expectations of British audiences.

Writing for a wider audience

The Fisk Jubilee Singers Across the Atlantic, History Today, October 2024

This 2,500 word piece recounts the first tour of Britain and Ireland by the Fisk Jubilee Singers between 1872 and 1873. The singers, made up primarily of formerly enslaved people, toured to raise money for Fisk University, a college in Nashville that was established primarily to educate emancipated African Americans. The group sung for Queen Victoria, William Gladstone and John Bright, as well as for monster audiences at venues including Crystal Palace and Wemyss Castle. In addition to emphasizing the group's popularity and the significance of them introducing British audiences to the 'spiritual', I also compare the racial contexts in Britain and the United States at the time. While Britain was at the time the world's largest empire, the Jubilee Singers also claimed to receive better treatment there than they ever had in the United States. Why was this the case? Read the article to find out. 

Why the Yankees-Red Sox series reflected a celebration of Americanness in London, The Washington Post, 2019.

I wrote this short piece for the Washington Post's 'Made by History' series to coincide with the first Major League Baseball London Series in summer 2019. It contextualises the ‘Americanness’ of the sport’s presentation across the Atlantic by contrasting the London Series with three baseball tours to Britain between 1874 and 1914. Attempts to popularise baseball across the Atlantic during this period resulted in derision and mockery, with many British observers comparing baseball negatively to cricket. The article shows that British rejection of the sport during the 19th century encouraged writers and businessmen in the United States t create a nationalist mythology around the sport, presenting baseball as a uniquely American sport that was free from the trappings of the ‘Old World’. This connected with a broader culture project in the 1890’s and 1900’s to justify the United States’ growing global power by differentiating it from the empires of Europe. It also demonstrates parallels between the earlier tours and the 2019 series, most notably through the presence of members of the British Royal Family at the games. I really enjoyed writing it!