Sutapa Biswas, Housewives with Steak-Knives, 1985. Oil, acrylic, and pastel on paper, mounted on canvas 96 x 108 inches. Collection of Bradford Museums and Galleries

In the context of the British Black Arts Movement, black was an expansive and inclusive term that comprised people of Asian and Indian, as well as Caribbean and African, descent--people who came, or whose parents had come, to Britain from the former colonies of the British Empire. To be "black" had resounding political connotations, Baucom observes. " 'Black' in the 1980s was a way of identifying people who had been disenfranchised, as well as making a kind of ethnic and racial mark."

The disenfranchisement came in various guises. Under Thatcherism, it was evidenced in the British laws of suspicion, know as "Sus" laws, which allowed the police to arrest people not just for crimes that had been committed, but also for crimes that they suspected might be committed, Baucom says. Black Britons believed that the police used the Sus laws to target, harass, intimidate, and discriminate against nonwhite Britons. In 1981, tensions over the Sus laws and other factors led to the Brixton riots, three days of violence, looting, and burning. An official report published after the fact found that the riots "were caused by serious social and economic problems affecting Britain's inner cities." One of the main causes of the outbreak was "racial disadvantage that is a fact of British life," the report found.

Also contributing to the outrage expressed in the riot, and much of the Black Art that followed, was the British Nationality Act of 1981, which sought to define British citizenship in radically circumscribed terms: You were British only if you were descended from an ancestor born in the British Isles. The law abolished "the historic right of common British citizenship enjoyed by the colonial peoples," according to the Sunday Times. "In effect," Baucom wrote in a 1999 book, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity, "the law thus drew the lines of the nation rather snugly around the boundaries of race."