Join editors Clive Chijioke Nwonka and Matthew Harle to discuss their fantastic new history of Arsenal Football Club.
Arsenal is special. Its multicultural fandom reflects a changing city and a unique relationship with Black British popular culture. Thanks to its decades of fielding iconic Black players on the pitch and the storied and diverse histories of its terraces, Arsenal has emerged as a powerful symbol of what an organic and convivial multiculture can be.
From the earliest hints in the late 1960s that something remarkable was happening, up to Arsenal’s ascendence as a global organisation, Black Arsenal is the first dedicated exploration of the club’s relationship to contemporary Black identity and culture. It sees the club’s affinity with Black identity transcend football and spread across cultures: in the media, music, fashion, politics and everyday social experiences. Explored through a combination of stunning photography and rare archival images, Black Arsenal examines how a new Black iconography emerged at Arsenal at key moments in British history that became crucial to the creation of new forms of Black identification.
With contributions including former legends Ian Wright and Paul Davis, critical appraisals from Paul Gilroy, Gail Lewis and Clive Chijioke Nwonka, and personal responses from Clive Palmer, Ezra Collective, Amy Lawrence and others, Black Arsenal encounter the moments, stories and experiences of how Arsenal became an important and underexamined feature of modern Black British culture and identity.
Clive Chijioke Nwonka is Associate Professor in Film, Culture and Society at UCL, and Faculty Associate of the UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation, UK. Dr. Nwonka’s research is interdisciplinary and spans across Film Studies, literature, Cultural Studies, Black Studies and Sociology.
Matthew Harle is a writer and curator from London. He has written books on writers and artists, mythic television plays, miners strikes, lost address books and football. He also makes exhibitions, film programmes and artist’s books that draw upon documents of everyday life, cities, archive collections, cultural heritage and the history of ideas. Matthew has taught English Literature and Cultural History at Birkbeck and Yale. He is a trustee of the Rita Keegan Archive & Studio, originally part of the team that assembled and curated Keegan’s artworks and archive.
Copies of the book will be on sale on the evening. This event is organised in partnership with Stanchion Books. Stanchion is a bookshop based in Hackney specialising in independently-minded football books, magazines, fanzines, photobooks, kids books and more.
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