The Front Room: Diaspora migrant aesthetics in the Home
This is a revised edition of The Front Room: Migrant aesthetics in the Home, originally published by Black Dog in 2009, which was made possible with initial funding from the Municipality of Tilburg, The Netherlands, where The Front Room installation was iterated as Van Huis Uit toured in 2008. This updated version published by Lund Humphries draws on McMillan’s beloved and much-praised work about how post-war Caribbean migrants expressed living in post-imperial Britain through the decoration and dressing of their living rooms with a foreword from Margaret Busby.
Primarily concerned with Caribbean-British homes, the book also looks at Moroccan, Surinamese, Antillean and Indonesian migrant communities in the Netherlands through oral histories, artistic photographs and archive documents that express shared diasporic cultural markers through the domestic interiors of migrants. McMillan explores how this intimate space within the home intersects class, race, migration, aspiration, religion, family, gender, identity, pleasure and being Othered. Drawing on his family’s migrant experience, he unpacks the transition from the colonial to post-colonial modernity in being and becoming Black British.
This revised edition includes updates of the original essays from leading social commentators, the late Stuart Hall, as well as Denise Noble, Carol Tulloch and Dave Lewis, poems by Khadijah Ibrahiim and Dorothea Smartt, and paintings by Sonia Boyce, Kimathi Donkor and Njideka Akunyili Crosby. It also examines the iteration of the 'front room' in post apartheid South Africa, and how the front room was a site of cultural political resistance with the creation of independent Black bookshops and publishers Bogle L’Ouverture and New Beacon Books.
A time has passed, and McMillan’s parents have passed away including some contributors in the original publication, now out of print, and the front room is no more as many of the Windrush generation are also dying. But in the afterlife of Windrush immigration continues to be racialised, and the front room’s legacy are its values that remain important for subsequent generations in the wake of Black life and death.