The Front Room: Migrant Aesthetics in the Front Room

The Front Room is a unique study by writer/curator Michael McMillan of the position of the home in different migrant groups. Embodied in The West Indian Front Room is the experience of growing up during the 1960’s and 1970’s in a Caribbean family settling in Britain. McMillan examines how these rooms raise issues of class, migration, aspiration, religion, alienation, family and the transition from the colonial to the post-colonial. The front room often provides an outlet to respond to the feelings of displacement, exile and alienation and the rebuilding of a home in strange land.

The Front Room discusses the groundings of the front room in Victoriana and colonialism, memories from first-generation West Indians and second-generation Black British. Primarily concerned with the West Indian front room the boom expands to the contemporary living room of Moroccan, Indonesian, Surinamese and Antillean migrant groups in Holland and their diasporas, the decoration of their interiors and their position throughout decolonisation.

With text from leading cultural theorist Stuart Hall, anecdotes from comedians Angie Le Mar, novelist Mike Phillips and artist Sonia Boyce amongst other, photographs of front room and living room installations and associated objected, this book presents a unique discussion of cultural studies.

‘At its heart is a lovingly re-created front room, typical of a Caribbean British household of the late Sixties or early Seventies…While we were looking at the stove [paraffin heater], a woman came up to McMillan bubbling with gratitude for the way he had captured her childhood. They had a stove [paraffin heater] just like that: she tells him, delightedly, how she used to burn her fingers on it.’
(Independent on Sunday ABC)

‘…whether, British or Dutch, the migrant experience resonates with the narrative of arriving in a country with nothing but dignity, the desire for respectability and aspirations for the future in a society that demonises you as the “other” ’.
(Amsterdam Weekly)

• http://www.theguardian.com/society/galle...
• http://www.theguardian.com/society/2009/...