Last week Emirates Stadium hosted the launch of Black Arsenal, a newly-released title from Dr Clive Nwonka, exploring the history and stories behind Arsenal’s links with Black culture.
The book includes contributions from Ian Wright, Paul Davis, Femi and TJ Koleoso, Clive Palmer, Paul Gilroy, Gail Lewis, Amy Lawrence and many more, each adding to the remarkable story of multicultural fandom.
Edited by Dr Clive Nwonka and Matthew Harle, the title was 10 years in the making, with a remarkable amount of research undertaken to produce the finished article. We caught up with Nwonka to ask him about the project.
First of all Clive, what was the inspiration behind the book?
Well it was me thinking a lot about my own background as a person and things that had inspired me. I had started working at the London School of Economics and I was thinking about the role of race in culture and ways of thinking. I was being introspective with myself and realising that John Barnes was important for me in terms of having a first source of inspiration and recognition.
I was very young, about six or seven years old, and he was the first Black player I saw on a Panini sticker. At that age you latch onto something that looks interesting, and so I also recognised that by the time we got to the mid-90s there was a different emphasis on Black masculinity. Those people I had grown up with were now finding recognition in somebody called Ian Wright.
So I was exploring what that meant and how it happened, and I realised Ian Wright seemed to represent a different kind of attitude or identity that was much more recognisable to those people around me. That became important to me in identifying what the cultural factors in that. I realised TV and the media was important, with Sky Sports and Ian Wright being part of a new generation who were being profiled in completely unprecedented ways – the Nike adverts and beyond. He became the first poster boy for the Premier League in many ways, and that visibility allowed the recognition on housing estates to be magnified in amazing ways.
Then that led to the inspiration for Black Arsenal. I was at university, making sense of what this concept is, and what the other factors in that could be. The chapter ‘Defining Black Arsenal’ is all about the genesis of that idea. Then you start looking at history and why do Black people in London gravitate mostly towards Arsenal.
Whether you are from south London or wherever, and then you realise there is a history that goes beyond Ian Wright, back to the 60s and 70s, to Brendon Batson, Paul Davis. It goes back to what Islington was in the 70s. It goes back to the JVC centre and the community work the club were doing in the 80s. All these factors were informing it before Ian Wright arrived in 1991.
Do you think Ian Wright’s impact on Black culture would have been the same had he arrived at a different club?
The whole Black Arsenal concept has all been engineered by happenstance and chance, which makes it more interesting from a research point of view. The interesting thing is, whenever I was doing field work, or walking around Highbury, around Holloway Road – morning, night, matchdays, non-matchdays – soaking up what is the continuity between what I see in the stands and what I see in the streets. You find it’s completely the same, but other clubs you go to, the fanbase does not reflect what you find on the streets and vice versa, but I think Arsenal does.
Every time I took a taxi, I always had a driver who was an Arsenal fan, it just kept happening. I would tell them I was going to Avenell Road, and they asked if I was a fan or if I worked there. I said that I was neither, I was doing some research into Black Arsenal, and they all had their own stories to tell, which was really important for me. Some were saying they learnt about multiculturalism through the club, others were asking if it’s something the club engineered and cultivated.
I would say it’s about Black people coming towards Arsenal. So what I mean by this is that there were so many things in place that allowed Ian Wright to become Ian Wright. If he’d gone to Liverpool, my team, would he have had the same impact? I don’t think he would have done. There was something about the right timing, the right club, the right person, the right culture tenor, the right transition period, the introduction of the Premier League and TV money. All those things happened at the right time to let him be who he is. Without those things happening, Black Arsenal wouldn’t be the same as a concept. It’s all about the conjuncture.
How did you structure the book and choose the contributors?
I worked for about six or seven years on developing different ideas for it, and had a rough idea on what I wanted tit to be. Initially it was going to be a short piece in New Statesman, reflecting on the concept. Then I approached Matthew Harle, a curator at the Barbican, who I had worked with in the past. The Barbican had hosted an orchestral treatment of Arsenal’s 1989 title win previously, so I asked if I could do a seminar there on Black Arsenal.
I thought it would be a small seminar in a room of 20 people, but they moved it to the biggest room at the Barbican. I tweeted about it and it sold out in 24 hours. That’s when I thought ‘something is going on here!’ I realised that me writing a book myself wouldn’t do justice to the manifold perspectives and ideas out there. So I thought an edited collection would be a truer representation of what Black Arsenal is and could be. So I asked Matt to come on board too. He’s an Arsenal season ticket holder, I’m not. I’m objective, he’s not. There are things he knows about the club, the fanbase and potential contributors that I don’t know. So let’s work as co-editors.
As a Black man I had a different perspective, but he was the one who suggested the amazing online supporter groups that Arsenal has. Arsenal Vision’s Clive Palmer and people like that.
Can you tell us about some of the storytellers in the book?
I had a scaffold of the important moments, and themes that I wanted to be addressed. Such as the mural in 1992 and the line up for the Leeds game in 2002. I wanted to revisit the lost names like Raphael Meade, Chris Whyte and Gus Caesar. I also wanted the perspective of people who aren’t in the stands every week, at the community level. The move from Highbury and Emirates, the connection with the residents.
I wanted Black women in there, talking about the women’s game. I knew Gail Lewis and Lola Young, long-term Arsenal fans. So it became ‘here is want in there, and are there people better placed to me to tell those stories?’ Thank God they were there – the Arsenal family is big! And multi-faceted, but speaking a common language from different perspectives.
Was there anything you discovered in the course of your research that surprised you?
Yes, I was certainly amazed by the club’s community work, that goes way back into the 80s. The JVC Centre at Highbury and what Arsenal did in the local community made me think a lot more about how Black people came to the club, rather than the club engineering it. That was a huge eye-opener and the images we found through the years showed me how important it was for Black people going to Arsenal from the 1970s.
Islington had a strong National Front presence in the 1970s, so that was interesting to me because Arsenal are here, and those days have gone, but Arsenal hasn’t been infiltrated from what I can understand. There was an element of self policing that Arsenal had. I don’t think I could write another book like this for any other club in the world. I genuinely think that, because what you would be doing is reducing its Black representation to players on the pitch.
Any club can do that, but how does it manifest beyond football, into culture, fashion, expression and engagements on the street and beyond. That’s what the book is about. There is a football club but also a deep cultural resonance that other clubs can’t influence in the same way, and that’s what made it fascinating for me.
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