Taste-cultures in the black British home

Chapter 19 Taste-cultures in the black British home Michael McMillan Introduction I grew up learning that ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’, and that no matter how poor we were, if the front room looked good then we were respectable. While as children we were not normally allowed into the front room unless there were guests, Sundays were an exception because it would have been ritually cleaned in readiness for some unknown visitor. I’d sit down obediently on the settee, plastic-covered to protect the upholstery, the plastic sticking to my skin. Bored, I would stare at a picture of a blue-eyed Jesus in The Last Supper on patterned floral wallpaper or notice a fly fooled by plastic flowers and colourful crochet on a fake marble coffee table. Thinking about aesthetics of the front room, was like nails scratching a blackboard, because it seemed to be in ‘bad taste’ or had no taste at all, in other words it was ‘kitsch’. (McMillan 2009: 9) The front room as ‘kitsch’ resonates on a generational level with those who were born in the UK during the 1960s and grew up in the 1970s, because it speaks to working-class respectability as expressed in the home. While ‘kitsch’ has been looked at as an expression of conspicuous consumption through the visuality of ‘bling’ (Thompson 2011), cultural hegemonic representation tends to fix diasporic black subjectivity within the public domain on the street as if the private realm in terms of home and family is of no significance. Yet within a society where race is inscribed, the home has been and remains in many ways a refuge of physical, emotional and spiritual safety for the black British subject. The black British home as a site for exploring subjectivities has been addressed by many black British writers, filmmakers, playwrights and visual artists, yet it is only beginning to receive attention within the academy (Shabazz 1981; Phillips 1981; Obaala Arts Collective 1985; Walker 1987; Levy 2004; McMillan 2009). Unpacking, therefore, how taste-cultures are made and remade within the domestic interior of the black British subject adds to this growing body of knowledge. Such an endeavour will inevitably raise the question of the post-war 611_19_The Persistence of Taste.indd 302 16/3/18 15:18:03 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Taste-cultures in the black British home 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 303 Caribbean migrant narrative and how migrant aesthetics in the home responds to the ‘everyday’ of the diasporic black subject as they struggle to ‘make do’ (De Certeau 1988). Critically, such an analysis has to engage with the cultural politics of difference, the nuanced and complex layers of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and generation, and the sensorial and sensual landscape of taste. Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding of taste, habitus and cultural capital provides an analytical framework for this exploration, though as we shall discover it needs to be extended and made more inclusive (Bourdieu 1984). Diasporic subjectivity within this narrative, as Stuart Hall characterises it, is a process of becoming where identity is performatively negotiating a ‘complex historical process of appropriation, compromise, subversion, masking, invention and revival’ (Hall 1993: 401). In this journey, diaspora is less about our identity being secured by returning to a ‘sacred homeland’ than a metaphor where there is no ‘essence of purity’, but rather embracing the idea of difference through heterogeneity and diversity (Hall 1993: 401). Black British identities as culturally, historically and politically constructed since at least the 1940s, the moment of post-war Caribbean migration (Hall and Sealy 2001: 12), are in a process of ‘becoming’ within the context of what Hall called the ‘multicultural drift’ (Hall 2006). Within the black home there is liminality between the political edge of the public realm or ‘frontline’, and the complications of the private domain or ‘backyard’ to use Hall’s conceptual framework (Hall 1998: 38). Unpacking the material culture of the home, therefore, opens up a crucible for understanding how the appropriation of the public world informs how taste codes were and are constructed (Miller 2001: 1). Born in the UK, my lived experience of growing up in a Caribbean home with both parents from St Vincent and the Grenadines informs my focus on the front room and the ethnographic research in curating The West Indian Front Room: Memories and Impressions of Black British Homes exhibition at the Geffrye Museum (McMillan 2005–2006). Taste Bourdieu’s ‘method’ using the related concepts of habitus, capitals and fields has relevance to our exploration of the black British home that I will draw on throughout. Briefly, habitus is constructed through the knowledge, values and behaviour of groups, and is also constituted in moments of practice in particular fields. Habitus does not describe the capital that a family possesses, but what it decides to do with it and how it decides to use that capital. For Bourdieu, individuals possess a range of capital that can be presented in three forms: economic capital (money and assets), social capital (social relationships and networks) and cultural capital. Cultural capital can also be embodied through habitus where social conditioning and positioning is ‘durably installed’, and objectified through the materiality of cultural goods. Paradigmatically, in Bourdieu’s schema, it is 611_19_The Persistence of Taste.indd 303 16/3/18 15:18:03 304 Michael McMillan not so much what we have, but what we feel about what we have, and therefore through cultural capital taste speaks to a sense of status. Inscribed in Bourdieu’s famous comment that ‘Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier’ in his seminal study Distinction (Bourdieu 1984: 448) is that taste is a socially constructed value judgement that reinforces class distinctions. Bourdieu replicates a familiar binary opposition between high and low in popular culture. Popular culture always has its base in the experiences, pleasures, memories and traditions of the people, yet it is also what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the ‘the vulgar’ – the popular, the informal, the grotesque that the dominant tradition is always wary of. It is the ‘carnivalesque’, as in carnival that was appropriated and reconstructed to subvert and transgress the power relations between master and slave, just as cultural hegemony is made, lost and struggled over (Gramsci 1971). For Bourdieu, there is a hierarchical distinction (Bourdieu 1984) between a bourgeois ‘taste of reflection’ where ‘beauty comes from that which transcends the narrow dictates of artistic convention’ and a working-class ‘taste of necessity’ where ‘beautiful art should depict beautiful things (flowers, sunsets, children …)’ (Binkley 2000: 14). In this schema ‘cultural capital’ as currency of taste is represented as the preserve of the middle classes while working-class ‘taste for the trinkets and knick-knacks’ is ‘unknown’ (Bourdieu 1984: 379) and Figure 19.1 Michael McMillan, The West Indian Front Room, 2005–2006. Installation comprising found objects, home furnishings, wood. 2 × 4 × 3 metres. Source: Geffrye Museum, London. Courtesy of John Neligan. 611_19_The Persistence of Taste.indd 304 16/3/18 15:18:04 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Taste-cultures in the black British home 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 305 therefore demonised as a ‘failed imitation’ because it has ‘no taste’ or is in ‘bad taste’ as in ‘kitsch’. In Sam Binkley’s valorisation of kitsch, Anthony Giddens’ ‘ontological security’ responds to ‘disembeddedness’ where institutions and practices ‘uproot individuals’ (Giddens 1991: 40, in Binkley 2000: 135). The ‘embeddedness’ of kitsch provides ‘a general corrective to a general modern problem, that of existential and personal disembeddedness’ (Binkley 2000: 149). For Binkley, kitsch relishes ‘embeddedness’ in routines that adhere to conventions rooted in the everyday that ‘preserves a unique aesthetic sensibility that spurns creativity per se while it endorses a repetition of the familiar’ (Binkley 2000: 134). As ‘uprooted individuals’ Caribbean migrants sought ‘ontological security’ in response to the traumatic ‘disembeddedness’ of migration. Binkley’s reclamation of taste embraces what Herbert Gans called ‘taste cultures’ (Gans 1974), namely ‘the ordering of different aesthetic morals, social aesthetics, the orderings of culture that opens up culture to the play of power’ (Hall 1992: 26). Paradigmatically, by critically engaging with the cultural politics of difference, the nuances of taste-cultures come into a sharper relief, and therefore resist being seduced by the relativist trope of plurality. The front room The front room is a culturally translated space that signifies a conservative element of black domestic life (Hall, in McMillan 2009: 20) that idealised the bourgeois tropes of the Victorian parlour that ‘was shot through with colonial Caribbean preoccupations with hygiene, social status linked to gendered racial respectability’ (Noble 2017: 21). This comes through its material culture and prescribed codes of behaviour that reflect a deeply aspirational diasporic black culture. It was also a contradictory space where the efficacy of the display was sometimes more important than the authenticity of the objects, such as floral patterned wallpaper and colourful carpet that never seemed to match, artificial flowers and plastic covered settees, rarely used glassware in ornate glass cabinets, pictures of The Last Supper juxtaposed with a scantily clad exotic ‘Tina’, and of course colourful crochet doiliescovering every surface. Coded in the dressing and maintenance of the front room is ‘impression management’ as a flexible ‘presentation of self ’, to echo Erving Goffman (Goffman 1959), that first of all pleases or provides a sense of ‘embeddedness’, and second, raises issues of ‘good grooming’ practices amongst people of African descent that is also gendered in terms of Denise Noble’s idea of ‘racial respectability’ (Noble 2017: 21). This echoes Daniel Miller’s duality of the transcendent and the transient. The transcendent resonates in the diasporic vernacular with ‘good grooming’ as a register of respectability, where in the front room ‘artificial things which are viewed as long lasting, and things covered over which are seen as cherished for the future’ (Miller 1996: 137). Meanwhile, the transient finds a register in reputation, which in a similar vernacular to ‘good grooming’, values 611_19_The Persistence of Taste.indd 305 16/3/18 15:18:04 306 Michael McMillan the public performances of speech, music, dance, sexual display and prowess. The culture of respectability has its roots in colonialism and the postemancipation struggle to reconstruct a sense of humanity and self-respect out of the brutal circumstances of enslaved plantation life (Hall, in McMillan 2009: 19). Registered in the diasporic front room is the habitus of being civilised through civilised behaviour, which is not about comfort, but the cultural capital of respectability, dignity and self-reserve where an etiquette of decorum, protocol, polite manners and proper behaviour are performed as rituals of the Victorian parlour. The Victorians were also the first hoarders and the practice of collecting things and cramming them together is also expressed in the bric-abrac aesthetics of the front room (Hall, in McMillan 2009: 20). The material culture of this ‘bric-a-brac’ is personally modulated through wedding and other familial-framed photographs, religious imagery, certificates of educational and other forms of achievement. Stuart Hall, who came to England from Jamaica as a young man, notes that they had dignity and respectability packed deep in their suitcases, and formally dressed as a sign of self-respect; with pressed dresses, hats at an angle in a ‘universally jaunty cocky’ style, in preparation for whatever was to happen next. They inherited a Victorian bourgeois sense of propriety expressed through self-respect and respectability in one’s appearance, the same as in the ‘High Street’ photo-portraits, with: the young woman with the gloves and handbag, holding up or being held up by the basket of artificial flowers. The well-dressed young man with the clip-on fountain pens, talking on a phone which is not connected to anything, but sitting on top of a mock-Greek half-column straight from the disused basement of the British Museum. (Hall 1984: 4) Being associated with signs of modernity, such as the telephone, provided a means to reimagine themselves that along with ‘Edwardian portraiture and the codes of the formal photograph, a formal icon in the domestic gallery of memories’ were inscribed in the photos sent ‘back home’. There is a structure of ‘presences’ in photographs, but also ‘absences’; the ‘unsaid, or unsayable’ against what is represented, and the erased and invisible narratives of rupture, trauma and acceptance that mediate migration (Hall 1984: 5). The framing of these formal portraits is just as important as the photograph, and echoes what Miller sees as the practice of layering and covering of things that speak of family longevity and respectability. a layering and covering of things, from the crochet-style toilet roll covers to throws (cloth that covers the sofa seats so that you don’t actually see them) but also the fact that the stuffed toys remain in the their plastic bags, or that artificial lace covers a variety of different surfaces. (Miller 2006: 101) 611_19_The Persistence of Taste.indd 306 16/3/18 15:18:04 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Taste-cultures in the black British home 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 307 Certain rituals ‘pierce’ this covering and layering, such as life-cycle celebrations: christenings, birthday, wedding parties and even funeral wakes. For instance, when my parents passed away each of them had a funeral or ‘Nine Night’ wake the night before the burial that included their open coffins placed in the front room where mourners could pay their last respects. The ‘Nine Night’ usually, though not always, nine nights after death, includes food, drink and music and provides a communal space where the life of the deceased can be remembered and celebrated before they move onto the next world. It is cultural capital expressed through ‘family longevity and respectability’ that Miller sees as ‘exactly the values, which are threatened by sexuality, associated with the outside and the ever present threat of disruptive bacchanal’ (Miller 2010: 102). Carnival in Trinidad is associated with ‘bacchanal’, and the masquerade as a ‘signifying practice’ (Hall et al. 2013: 237) where what is seen is not always what is. The mask is the signifier, while the masquerade is the signified, which as a ritual practice from Africa, served as a means of camouflage in slave plantation society. Using African Trickster figures, such as Anansi, the ancient power of Eshu and the subversive philosophical priorities mandated by the cosmic power of Ashe, slaves incorporated a performance strategy as a mask. This became a means of inverting and subverting the brutal oppression of plantation society through imitation, Figure 19.2 Michael McMillan, ‘multi-coloured floral patterned carpet’, The West Indian Front Room, 2005–2006. Installation comprising found objects, home furnishings, wood. 2 × 4 × 3 metres. Source: Geffrye Museum, London. Courtesy of Dave Lewis. 611_19_The Persistence of Taste.indd 307 16/3/18 15:18:04 308 Michael McMillan reinvention and artifice. As ‘there is no knowing when a love-object might be wrested away’ there was an ‘adaptive tendency to keep things on the surface, to refuse any internalization and thus to minimize one’s sense of loss’ (Miller 2010: 16). Yet ‘keeping things on the surface’ opens up the potential for relevation where ‘Bacchanal is the disorder that follows scandalous relevation. The class example is where a strict schoolteacher has tried to portray herself as thoroughly respectable, until a pregnancy reveals something is going on’ (Miller 2010: 18). In Caribbean vernacular, this behaviour would be seen as ‘carrying on like a poppy show’, because the very thing they are attempting to cover up is the very thing that reveals itself so that, as my mum would say, ‘they couldn’t smell their own piss’. The trope of ‘covering up’ as a signifying practice of the colonial culture is embodied in the character of Hortense in Levy’s novel, Small Island (2004) as a state of being. The struggle over order and disorder, respectability and reputation, the transcendent and the transient, ‘aspiration and attitude’, the private realm and the public domain, reflects how power is won and lost within popular culture. As Stallybrass and White argue, it is when the ‘top’ attempts to dismiss the ‘bottom’ for prestige and status that it discovers that it is dependent upon the ‘low-Other’ (Stallybrass and White 1986: 3, in Hall 1992: 33). ‘A room of her own’ In the dressing and maintenance of the front room, it was women who were traditionally judged on the basis of ‘good grooming’, or rather for Caribbean migrant working mothers and wives ‘gendered racial respectability’ as a means of ‘self-making’ in the home to counter colonial and postcolonial representations of the black family as pathological (Noble 2015: 19). Such practices, along with ‘Spring Cleaning’ rituals, were inscribed in a moral code as as habitus that fused religion, hygiene and the Protestant Work ethic: ‘Cleanliness is next to godliness’ and ‘By the sweat of your brow, thou shall eat bread’. This ethos would find expression in the aesthetics, in the presentation of the home and self, where order meant beauty, and beauty meant order. This was not a simple valorisation of white bias or ideals of beauty, but rather the consequences of negotiating cultural hegemony and regimes of power that objectified race in the realm of the domestic. As Anne McClintock points out, the domestic was a construction in colonialism to maintain hegemony over the division of labour at home and the subordinate ‘Other’ abroad (McClintock 1994). In the representation of the domestic and popular culture, the black subject has either been erased or stereotyped as an object of servitude, caricature, fear and desire. Consequently, the making of the front room signifies on one level black women’s aspirant mobility and a means of expressing her own femininity with the fruits of her labour, ‘through the slog of long, remorseless and difficult work’ (Hall 1998: 42). My mother loved her front room because she had the best furniture, the best carpet, the best pictures and the best of everything. It was her way of 611_19_The Persistence of Taste.indd 308 16/3/18 15:18:04 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Taste-cultures in the black British home 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 309 saying, this is my home, I can dress how I want, I don’t have to share it with anyone and I can have the home I’ve always wanted to have. (Angie Le Mar, in McMillan 2009: 85) For Michel De Certeau, the practices of everyday life are worth exploring, (1988) because they bring life to the ordinary aspects of daily life that are often taken for granted. De Certeau’s approach addresses how the agency of consumers is a form of ‘cultural consumption’ (Storey 1999: 49), which he labelled as ‘secondary production’ (Storey, 1999: 49). In this sense, consumers are active and discerning, rather than passive and compliant agents who ‘re-appropriate’ goods into their everyday lives. For De Certeau, critically interrogating the practice of cultural consumption implies questioning the notion that ‘assimilating’ means ‘becoming similar to’ what one absorbs, and not ‘making something similar’ to what one is, making it one’s own, appropriating or reappropriating (De Certeau, 1988: 166). As ‘poets of their own affairs’ (De Certeau, 1988) everybody is making a huge effort to create an individual space, and yet within the diasporic migrant front room the aesthetics are the same (Hall, in McMillan 2009: 22). Creolisation As a soft furnishing, crochet doilies used to layer, cover and enhance the display of things in the front room, were created by African-Caribbean migrant women who accepted these commissions to supplement their income. They produced elaborately patterned and colourful ‘sets’ with each design unique to the individual maker. A cloth-based ‘runner’ might be attached to the crochet and in order to enhance the sculpture of the copious folds, pieces were often ironstarched. They provided a lavish setting for vases of artificial flowers and other ornaments displayed on the glass cabinet, coffee table, sideboard or radiogram. Crochet as a cottage industry craft was common in Europe and usually made in plain white and cream colours. Crocheting was introduced by missionaries to the Caribbean where it was eventually integrated into a rudimentary and limited colonial education system, where girls from poor backgrounds were often taught seamstressing, domestic science and crocheting in preparation for the only ‘vocations’ available to them – domestic labour. My mother was a maid for a Dutch family for six years in Curaçao before coming to England, and ‘seamstress’ was put down as her occupation in her passport. Crocheting practices in the front room were a form of creolisation of popular culture in diasporic migrant context. In this taste-culture the ‘dialogic interventions of diasporic, creolizing cultures’ speak to a culturally entangled Caribbean where ‘there is no such thing as a pure point of origin’ (Hebdige 1987: 10). In linguistic terms, creolisation can be understood here as the appropriation of the English lexicon with an African grammar, in contrast with languages of the Other seen as dialects, bastardised forms of pidgin and uncivilised (Braithwaite 611_19_The Persistence of Taste.indd 309 16/3/18 15:18:04 310 Michael McMillan 1984). Creolisation as entanglement resists the psychic inferiorisation, as Frantz Fanon argues, by providing a political understanding of racial hegemonies at the level of black subjectivity (Fanon, in Williams and Williams 1993: 37). My mother loved her maroon coloured velvet flock wallpaper with matching curtains and a Drylon upholstered settee, which years later I realized was the same décor used in Indian restaurants. It was almost a Caribbean adaptation of what was perceived of an 18th Century Georgian grand house, which ironically might have been paid for from slave plantations profits. It looked horrible and even then you felt it was tacky and over the top, but there was some perverse pleasure to be had from rubbing the walls covered in velvet flock wallpaper which sadly a whole generation have missed out on. (Steve Pope, in McMillan 2009: 59) From the ‘maroonage’ of insurgent Africans, the spilt blood of Jesus Christ, to the West Indian cricket team’s colours, maroon has many meanings, as well as demonstrating the creative pragmatics of the ‘everyday’ as it hides dirt well. Indeed, a Trinidadian research respondent quoted by Miller felt that ‘Maroon is a colour which is red but not red, but it is more Englishanese, North Americanese, Europeanese, I have never been there (England) but I believe they use a lot of this reddish off-reddish in their upholstery’ (Miller 1994: 214). This transcultural imaginary challenges any fixed meaning and representation of difference that as a concept rethinks using Jacques Derrida’s anomalous ‘a’ in ‘différance’. For Hall, différance as ‘strategic and arbitrary’ enables a positioning and repositioning of Caribbean diasporic identities as suggested by Aimé Césaire’s and Léopold Senghor’s metaphor: Présence Africaine, Présence Européenne and, more ambiguously, Présence Americaine. The dialogue of power and resistance, of refusal and recognition, with and against Présence Européenne is almost as complex as the ‘dialogue’ with Africa. In terms of popular cultural life, it is nowhere to be found in its pure, pristine state. (Hall 1993: 400) This différance comes through implicitly in Miller’s perspective that the front room created by Caribbean migrants ‘owes little, though, to anything Caribbean, but owes much to working class traditions. In their search for respectability in London the migrants had copied the tradition of the parlour’ (Miller 2010: 105). What Miller fails to notice here is that English culture has already been experienced through the colonial Caribbean, and African-Caribbean migrants arrive with an idea of the Victorian parlour and its English aesthetics that they will eventually attempt to recreate in their homes. Therefore, the question is not how ‘authentically’ Caribbean it is, but rather how has the 611_19_The Persistence of Taste.indd 310 16/3/18 15:18:04 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Taste-cultures in the black British home 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 311 Figure 19.3 Michael McMillan, ‘The Last Supper’, The West Indian Front Room, 2005–2006. Installation comprising found objects, home furnishings, wood. 2 × 4 × 3 metres. Source: Geffrye Museum, London. Courtesy of Dave Lewis. colonial Caribbean been translated by African-Caribbean migrants who are experiencing their own postcolonial modernity. While the African-Caribbean migrants front room does resonate with a working-class sense of respectability as a translated taste-culture it is also embodied through the bourgeois preoccupation with the values of Christian propriety, the obsession with hygiene and respectability that speaks to a multicultural generational identification and recognition for those growing up during the 1970s. It also resonates with what Rollock calls a ‘moral capital’ – ‘that is an awareness and concern about the circumstances of others alongside a recognition of the value of goods and people around them’ (Rollock et al. 2015: 171). This stems from the memory of a working-class past where there was an understanding of what it meant to have nothing. This moral capital can also be ascribed to many West Indian immigrants who arrived with just a ‘grip’ suitcase, but with a sense of respectability, dignity and aspirations packed deep inside, and used strategies such as deferred gratification, such as the ‘pard’ner hand’/susu where small groups saved amongst each other to raise the deposit to put down on a house or furnish their homes if they could only get a council flat and house. Imbued with an English colonial education system, many African-Caribbean migrants took their British citizenship very seriously and regarded themselves 611_19_The Persistence of Taste.indd 311 16/3/18 15:18:04 312 Michael McMillan not as strangers, but as English (hence they saw themselves as migrants, not immigrants). Through migration, many were soon dismayed when they found that they had to settle for a lower job status than they had back home (Fryer 1984: 374). Their experience represents what might be described as ‘classdownsizing’ (Rollock et al. 2015:4), when in fact a large proportion were skilled manual workers and artisans, as well as from what would be in a Caribbean colonial context middle-class backgrounds. This social leveling was reinforced by living in urban deprived areas, where the stores and markets that AfricanCaribbean immigrants and their working-class neighbours and work colleagues furnished their homes were located. Race and class are inseparable and, as Stuart Hall reminds us, ‘Race is the modality in which class is lived. It is also the medium in which class relations are experienced’ (Hall et al. 1978: 153). While there has been a growth of the black professional class in Britain since the 1970s, second-generation migrant descendants, like myself, have not had the job opportunities commensurate with our high levels of education unlike our white counterparts. Moreover, the intersection of race and class has not received sufficient critical attention in studies about the histories of the black British experience. In The Colour of Class: The Educational Strategies of the Black Middle Classes (Rollock et al. 2015) found that black middle-class respondents in their research felt ambivalent about their class position within the British education system, because they were not entirely accepted by the white middle class yet were not part of the black working class. Kesha S. Moore’s study in the USA looks at how class shapes ‘articulation of a black racial identity’ and identifies a multi-class and middle-class minded sensibility in African-American middle-class identity in a Philadelphia neighbourhood. These two middle-class sensibilities overlap and refers to those less securely established in black middle classes who have experienced social mobility in their lifetime, providing them with a unique ‘outsider-within’ – insider/outsider (Moore 2008: 506). Moore’s middle-class minded modality resonates with Steve Pope’s mother’s sense of her own habitus cultural capital: Given the racist climate in society at the time, my mother was ironically a bit snobbish about the habits of the English working class and such as her set of silver cake forks, which she had brought from the Caribbean, but felt were unappreciated in England because the lower classes ate cake with their hands. And many West Indians used and still use this sense of moral superiority to insulate themselves from hostile and racist comments. (Steve Pope, in McMillan 2009: 76) A multi-class modality resonates with the black British subject through social mobility and is able to ‘code-switch’ between middle-class and working-class milieus. Multi-class experiences also resonate with ‘moral capital’ on a generational plane as communities of interest who are more engaged in valorising the past as a means of understanding the future than in the conditions of the 611_19_The Persistence of Taste.indd 312 16/3/18 15:18:04 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Taste-cultures in the black British home 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 313 present. These sentiments chime with what Miller critiques as the ‘fashion for roots’ where there is an immigrant desire to identify ‘authentic’ cultural roots that provide ‘ontological security’ in the face of racism and oppression (Miller 2010: 106). Paradimagatically, this alludes to the ways that immigrants diasporically might romanticise the ‘home’ they left behind through the cultural traditions they attempt to protect and practice where they now reside, even though those traditions have long since been superseded back home. The romance of such a generational gaze may evoke a sense of loss and nostalgia in the act of remembering, but remembrance is an imperfect process and the trope of memory is to forget. Does nostalgia play a role in this memorialisation? What is nostalgia? In Native Nostalgia Jacob Dlamini advocates a ‘reflective nostalgia’ to unpack the material culture of township life of his youth under apartheid in South Africa, which resists the homogenisation of the black experience at that moment with a more differentiated and complex portrayal (Dlamini 2009). A key moment of diasporic identification within this generational ‘reflective nostalgia’ is the summer of 1976, when students rose up in Soweto, and black youths rose up at the Notting Hill Carnival. These were not homogenous black revolts, but a generation rebelling against what they saw as the complacency of their parents. The house that was my home A few years ago when both my parents passed away, my siblings and I cleared the house we had called home for most our lives before selling it on. This was a terraced Edwardian-styled house on a residential road in Clapton, Hackney, London that was bought at a moment of ‘white flight’ from the area when more African-Caribbean migrants began to settle there. It was structurally sound and always well maintained, because my dad would always busy himself during the summer months attending to the maintenance around and inside the house. As my mum seemed to be more concerned about managing impressions in the neighbourhood it was at her behest that dad would be up a ladder every couple of years repointing the external brick-work, replastering concrete window sills and pillars, and maintaining the roof. The domestic interior was also her domain, and the wallpaper, carpet and paintwork in the passage (hallway), and different rooms throughout the house, especially the front room, was always being upgraded by my dad according to her changing tastes. Coming from poor backgrounds, my parent’s moral capital was that nothing should go to waste, and my mum’s hoarding was about ‘putting down’ things because ‘you never knew when you might need them’. These moments rarely arrived and in the meantime, she would travel far and wide for a bargain: bed linen, towels, curtains, toiletries, crockery or glassware. It was only when we had to clear the house after her passing that we realised how much of a hoarder she was. It took months, not because we couldn’t decide what to keep, but because there was so much stuff. It was also emotionally cathartic in the process of 611_19_The Persistence of Taste.indd 313 16/3/18 15:18:04 314 Michael McMillan Figure 19.4 Michael McMillan, ‘The Bluespot radiogram’, The West Indian Front Room, 2005–2006. Installation comprising found objects, home furnishings, wood. 2 × 4 × 3 metres. Source: Geffrye Museum, London. Courtesy of Dave Lewis. reminiscing over what and how we were embodied in the material culture of the home that we grew up in that we now wanted to let go. Once it was cleared, and before the house was sold, I would often pass by and sit quietly in the different rooms, now bare, and the garden, remembering events, conversations, sounds, smells and relationships triggered by these spaces. As a memory marker the house in whichwe spent our formative years now signified the end of an era. Endings are always difficult to comprehend, yet when I saw fixtures and features of a domestic aesthetic we had grown up with now dumped as rubbish in the front garden ready for a skip by the new house owners, I felt viscerally that this was the end. There was the carpet and lino flooring that, whether colourfully patterned or plain, always had a touch of maroon. There was the white Formica particle-board wardrobe and dressing table units, custom-made to fit into wall alcoves and over fireplace chimneys. They were usually made by ‘cowboy’ carpenters who often exploited family friends and fellow Vincentians in how much they charged, and how they worked. What has become of the home that I grew up in, that is no more, also signifies the process of gentrification taking place within the British urban landscape. White affluent working-class and middle-class families took flight from areas like Clapton and Stoke Newington in Hackney to the suburbs when 611_19_The Persistence of Taste.indd 314 16/3/18 15:18:04 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Figure 19.5 Michael McMilllan, ‘artificial flowers in vase on multi-coloured starched crochet doily’, The Front Room ‘Inna Joburg’, (detail) 2016. Installation comprising found objects, home furnishings, wood. 2.5 × 4.5 × 5 metres. Source: FADA Gallery, Johannesburg. Courtesy of Eugene Hön. 611_19_The Persistence of Taste.indd 315 16/3/18 15:18:04 316 Michael McMillan African-Caribbean migrants began buying houses and moving into council estates there from the 1950s onwards. Growing up, ‘Stokie’, as many local people called Stoke Newington, had a reputation for having the worst police station in the country, and being ‘streetwise’ was commonsense. Yet there was a sense of belonging in an area that included Ridley Road Market catering for Caribbean foodstuffs, clubs like Four Aces in Dalston, Blues parties and Shebeens, and the frontline that attracted black people from all over. Since then, many Caribbean parents have either returned home or passed away, and the houses they left behind can now command high prices on the property market, which has benefited their children. But this is a bitter sweet reward for what our parents worked hard to acquire and maintain, because many of us cannot afford to buy those houses in areas in whichwe grew up. It is now largely the preserve of the white middle-class families or ‘yuppies’ as if they have returned to reclaim what they originally took flight from. And walking around Stoke Newington today, especially Church Street with its estate agents, artisan and craft shops, and café culture, one has a sense of being Othered where being black does not seem to fit with the demographic profile of the area anymore. However, many of those who grew up in urban inter-city areas in London where a rabid gentrification is taking place often feel displaced and alienated from areas that many see as being ethnically cleansed. Part of that ‘cleansing’ also means that the cultural histories of areas and sites are either erased or hidden in a sanitised mis(sed) re-presentation of the urban landscape as theme park. An engagement with nostalgia is important here not to return to the good old days, but to acknowledge loss in the process of transition. Conclusion It is evident from this discussion that the taste-culture that is made and remade within the black British home, and in particular the front room, extends and makes more inclusive Bourdieu’s schema around taste, habitus and cultural capital. In unpacking the taste-culture of the front room we find a deeply aspirational diasporic black culture that is expressed in migrant aesthetics in the home and creative practices of the ‘everyday’. These practices resonate generationally with classed and gendered racial respectability, and a sense of reflective nostalgia and moral capital. The practice of layering and covering up of things reflects the ontological struggle over respectability and reputation, aspiration and attitude, in African diasporic taste cultures. As performative strategies that were adapted for survival during colonialism ‘keeping things on the surface’ still have a significant role within the vernacular of postcolonial modernity. This also speaks to the subversive nature of creolisation within popular culture and how cultural hegemony is continually being contested. Ultimately, the taste-cultures we have explored within the context of what Hall calls the inevitable ‘multicultural drift’ are always in the process of being made, and remade, becoming and disappearing. 611_19_The Persistence of Taste.indd 316 16/3/18 15:18:04 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Taste-cultures in the black British home 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 317 References Bakhtin, M. (1935) Speech Genres and Other Later Essays, Austin: University of Texas. Binkley, S. 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