Necrosexual Politics

: A Study of Windrush Migration and Windrush Cultural Identity in Britain Written Through The Classic Songs of Black Caribbean Cultural Memory

Abstract

The ‘Windrush story’ is a narrative that celebrates Black Caribbean migration to Britain between 1948 and 1971. Such is the state significance of Windrush, there is a National Windrush monument situated at Waterloo train station in London and Windrush itself is now a metonym for Black Caribbean identity. The narrative reproduces an image of a wave of Black migration across the Atlantic ocean without foregrounding the truth that the Black individuals undertaking this voyage were the direct descendants of enslaved Africans that were forced to endure the Middle Passage during Transatlantic slavery. This ancestral relationship between master and slave is examined in relation to the British state’s current relationship with its slave-descended Windrush citizens to question the social and political function of Windrush. Using a method of ‘contrapuntal eroticism’, this study interrogates cultural memory and advances the work of Necropolitics and Sexual Politics to produce an alternative framework of Necrosexual Politics to better understand how the symbiosis between forgetting and remembering constitutes a statecraft of intimate violence. The methodology is centred on an ethic committed to affirming the axiological value of Black Caribbean musical knowledge. Throughout the research, academic literature is juxtaposed with classic songs of Black Caribbean musical heritage so that the songs of scholars such as Wretch 32 are entered into dialogue with the work of academic artists such as Fanon’s Wretched of The Earth. The research invites the reader to journey through Black Caribbean musical memory and introduces a model of Cultural Working Memory to reconceptualise British national memory as ‘The New Plantation’ complete with slave systems of forgetting and remembering. Necrosexual Politics challenges existing theoretical debates across the Social Sciences concerned with social death, memorialisation and cultural identity through an aesthetic that evokes the pleasures associated with the musicality and lyricism of Black Caribbean musical memory.

Date of Award	1 Apr 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Portsmouth
Supervisor	Naheem Jabbar (Supervisor), Simon Edwards (Supervisor) & Lambros Fatsis (Supervisor)