Dark Matter: Black Sociality and Queer (Il)legibility in Liverpool 8, 1967-1997
Khalil R West (European University Institute)

This is the inaugural talk of the Goldsmiths Centre for Queer History queer history PhD network. We are delighted that it can be delivered by Khalil West, an alum of our MA Queer History. If you are interested in joining the PhD network, please sign up at: https://forms.office.com/e/1CH...

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In the cannon of queer British history, racialized ‘dystopias’ (i.e., ghettos) have remained underexplored. Even in the recent proliferation of works focused on more diverse urban, suburban, and rural environments, sites signifying meeting points of industrial decline, social immobility, and racial marginality outside of capital cities have largely escaped queer historical enquiry. One such place is Liverpool, the site of Britain’s oldest settled black community. Once a thriving port city, by the 1990s it was the prime example of the failures of post-war Britain, due in no small part to the 1981 ‘Toxteth Riots’ which have come to historically define the city and its black district. Toxteth – more commonly referred to by its postcode prefix Liverpool 8 (or L8) by locals – was known in the mid-Century as “Little Harlem”. Its Afro-Caribbean club scene has long been a site of research for sonic geographers, musicologists, and scholars interested in British race relations. However, queer historians have ignored L8 as a site of potential study or recovery, arguably because its archive offers no legibly queer social spaces. Using oral histories conducted with clubgoers, promoters, and past and present residents of the district, this paper explores L8’s historic nightlife venues as a landscape of erotic possibility through, rather than against, their historical illegibility as queer.

Contextual Material

There are two short videos and excerpts of an interview which can be accessed at www.kwest.work/darkmatter. Together, these materials provide helpful context for this research. Transcripts for the videos can be found at www.kwest.work/transcripts

Khalil R. West is a PhD candidate in History at European University Institute. He graduated as part of the inaugural MA Queer History cohort at Goldsmiths, University of London. His current research explores mid- to late-twentieth-century (queer) black socialities in Newark, NJ, and Liverpool, UK. His ongoing (2015-present) visual oral history project, I Am For You Can Enjoy, is an Arts Council England-funded collaboration with British photographer Ajamu X which examines labour, agency, and pleasure in the experiences of black, masculine-identified sex workers. He is the Co-Founder of Chew Disco, a Liverpool-based party and multidisciplinary art project which raised funds for safe houses and advocacy organizations working on behalf of sexual minorities, women and girls in DR Congo, Uganda, Iraq, Iran, and Russia. His writing has appeared in Attitude, Out There, and Homoculture, and new work will appear in Unsafe Words: Black Radical Pleasure II, a forthcoming issue (vol. 53, no. 2) of The Black Scholar. As a programmer and curator, he has worked with Homotopia, Manchester Pride/Superbia, and Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT), among others. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of Islington Mill Foundation which is dedicated to queer arts, local history, and heritage-focused community outreach, training, and mentoring in Manchester and Salford.