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Bettina Jansen

NARRATIVES OF
COMMUNITY IN
THE BLACK BRITISH
SHORT STORY
 Narratives of Community in the Black British
Short Story

“Jansen’s new book is a brilliant critical response to the social and cultural
­transformations in contemporary Britain, providing a rigorous critical answer to
the urge of posing solutions to social conflict. Covering a wide range of authors,
here Jansen articulates the first systematic analysis of the black British short story
through the adequate lens of postcolonial and philosophical concepts of commu-
nity in what stands out as an essential thorough examination of both “black British
literature” and the short story, thus constituting an illuminating contribution to
the field.”
—Laura Mª Lojo-Rodríguez, Senior Lecturer in English,
University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and coeditor of
Gender and Short Fiction: Women’s Tales
in Contemporary Britain (2018)
 Bettina Jansen

Narratives
of Community
in the Black British
Short Story
Bettina Jansen
TU Dresden
Dresden, Germany

ISBN 978-3-319-94859-1 ISBN 978-3-319-94860-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94860-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018947412

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
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 Acknowledgements

This book began life as a Ph.D. thesis at TU Dresden, Germany.

Therefore, I owe my thanks to the community of scholars at the uni-
versity’s English Department of which I have been a part. My supervi-
sor Stefan Horlacher gave me the freedom to follow my fascination with
British short story writing and to make the black British short story
the main subject of my academic research. He encouraged me to work
towards an innovative theoretical framework and offered helpful advice
along the way. Moreover, I am grateful for the opportunity to discuss
my findings with the participants in the Department’s postgraduate
colloquium, and I am indebted to the questions, suggestions, and reas-
surances from my colleagues and friends at the Department, especially
Mirjam Frotscher, Christina Kegel, Andrea Kiel, Ulrike Kohn, Thomas
Kühn, Wieland Schwanebeck, Robert Troschitz, and Gesine Wegner.
My expertise in the field of short story research has been crucially
shaped by my membership in the Society for the Study of the Short
Story in English, and the European Network for Short Fiction Research.
I am particularly obliged to the inspiration, encouragement, and sup-
port I received from Laura Lojo-Rodríguez (University of Santiago de
Compostela). Furthermore, my research has profited from its critical dis-
cussion at a number of international conferences; I would like to thank
especially Hywel Dix (Bournemouth University) and Elke D’hoker (KU
Leuven) for their insightful criticism and recommendations for fur-
ther reading. In the final stages of preparing this book, I have greatly

v
vi    Acknowledgements

benefited from the advice and support I received from Mita Choudhury
(Purdue University).
My thanks are also due to the staff of the Saxon State and University
Library Dresden, who knowledgeably and patiently helped me trace sin-
gle short stories in diverse newspapers and magazines at the outset of my
research, and Allie Troyanos and Rachel Jacobe at Palgrave Macmillan,
whose professionalism made the publication of my findings an enjoyable
experience.
Last but not least, I would like to thank my parents Susanne and
Gernoth Schötz for awakening my love of literature and sparking my
enthusiasm for British culture, and for encouraging me to pursue
these interests academically. My sister Juliane Weidmüller and her fam-
ily helped me not to forget the life outside of fiction. And my husband
Sebastian and our son Johann have brought so much joy into my life and
have shown great patience as I completed this book.
 Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Theories of Community 35

Part I The Early Black British Short Story, c 1950–1980

3 The West Indian Immigrant Community: Samuel Selvon 67

4 The Emergence of a Black British Community:

Farrukh Dhondy 89

Part II Hanif Kureishi and the Black British Short Story

since the 1980s

5 “A New Way of Being British”: Kureishi’s ‘Ethnic’

Short Stories 117

6 Human Commonalities: Kureishi’s ‘Postethnic’

Short Stories 131

vii
viii    Contents

Part III The Local Black British Short Story since the 1990s

7 Scottish Singular Plurality: Jackie Kay 153

8 Scottish Community between Essence

and (De-)Construction: Suhayl Saadi 185

9 Accidental Englishness: Zadie Smith 207

Part IV The Cosmopolitan Black British Short Story

since the 1990s

10 Tour du Monde: Hari Kunzru 257

11 The World as Singular Plural Composite: Suhayl Saadi 279

12 Conclusion 309

Index 325
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The question of community, the question of how we want to live

together, is one of the crucial questions of our times. Our contemporary
era is shaped by struggles over race relations and concepts of community.
Although migration, cross-cultural exchange, and transnational coopera-
tion have become inherent aspects of our globalised lives, growing num-
bers of migrants as well as political refugees lead to periodic eruptions of
racist and nationalist sentiments in many countries across the world. In
Postcolonial Melancholia, Paul Gilroy warningly notes a global resurgence
of “patriotism and ethnic-absolutism” (2005, 65). In Britain, too, the
increase in Islamist terrorist attacks and the perceived threat of uncon-
trollable immigration have resulted in a racist backlash. The historic
Brexit referendum was arguably won by an Islamophobic and anti-
immigration leave campaign that revived the myth of a quintessentially
white, monocultural, and homogeneous ‘British culture’. As a conse-
quence, more than half of the British population feel that “ethnic minor-
ities [threaten] their ‘culture’” (Hirsch 2017) and have become hostile
towards both newly arriving refugees and British-born minorities.
What populist and nationalist evocations of an ‘original’ ethno-racial
community conceal, however, is that human history is a history of migration
and that the nation-states in their presently existing forms are fairly recent
‘inventions’ (see Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Anderson [1983] 1991). As
early as in 1701, Daniel Defoe reminds his fellow countrymen that there
is no “True-Born Englishman,” for “from a Mixture of all Kinds began,/
That Het’rogeneous Thing, An Englishman” ([1701] 1974, 42–43).

© The Author(s) 2018 1

B. Jansen, Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94860-7_1
2 B. JANSEN

The right-wing notion of a hereditary and eternal English or British national

community is a fabricated fiction, the myth of “community as essence”
(Nancy [1986] 1991, xxxviii). Nevertheless, traditional, essence-based
notions of community have real-life consequences for those excluded,
who suffer from discrimination, violence, and, in extreme cases, systematic
persecution.
In order to arrive at new, peaceful, and respectful paradigms of liv-
ing together, it is necessary to deconstruct conventional conceptions of
community that associate a sense of belonging with a shared territorial,
ethno-racial, and/or spiritual essence. The thinking of community, the
French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy argues,

can no longer be a matter of figuring or modeling a communitarian

essence in order to present it to ourselves and to celebrate it, but […] it is
a matter rather of thinking community […] beyond communitarian mod-
els or remodelings. ([1986] 1991, 22)

What is at stake, then, is a redefinition of “[t]he very concepts of homo-

geneous national cultures […] or ‘organic’ ethnic communities” (Bhabha
[1994] 2004, 6–8). We need to rethink existing social and cultural for-
mations in order to replace the traditional ideology of homogeneity
and ethno-racial as well as cultural purity with an acknowledgement of
heterogeneity and a general openness towards others. Ultimately, the
postcolonial critic Homi K. Bhabha rightly argues, refugees just like post-
colonial migrants, diasporic peoples, and exiles are currently initiating “a
radical revision in the concept of human community itself” (ibid., 8).
Literature plays an important role in this deconstruction of preva-
lent notions of community because literature, Nancy stresses, “[opens]
community to itself” ([1986] 1991, 80). By inscribing community’s
“infinite resistance to everything that would bring it to completion,” lit-
erature exposes alternative, non-essentialist models of community (ibid.,
81). The black British writer and critic Caryl Phillips, too, points to the
immense potential that literature holds for a renegotiation of commu-
nity. In his essay “Colour Me English” (2011), he calls for an inclusion-
ary and polycultural1 understanding of British and European community,
urging us to “remind ourselves of the lesson that great fiction teaches
us as we sink into character and plot and suspend our disbelief: for
a moment, ‘they’ are ‘us’” (16). Literature encourages us to change
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

perspectives and relate to the supposed other, discovering that they are
not so different from ourselves but, in fact, “fellow human beings” (17).
Phillips emphasises that “[a]s long as we have literature as a bulwark
against intolerance, and as a force for change, then we have a chance”
(16). Not only does fiction possess “the moral capacity […] to wrench us
out of our ideological burrows and force us to engage with […] a world
that is peopled with individuals we might otherwise never meet in our
daily lives,” but “literature is [also] plurality in action” (ibid.). It presents
various characters and gives voice to their thoughts and feelings without
judging or even ranking them. Ultimately, Phillips argues, literary texts
“[implore] us to act with a compassion born of familiarity towards our
fellow human beings, be they Christian, Jew, Muslim, black, brown or
white” (16–17).
The German literary theorist and cultural critic Ottmar Ette sim-
ilarly argues that literary texts store a wealth of “knowledge for living
together” (2010, 989). He contends that “[t]he time is right to under-
stand literary scholarship as a science for living together” (991). Ette
urges literary scholars to use their analytical access to literary storehouses
of knowledge in order to partake actively in the contemporary discourse
about “how radically different cultures might live together” (983). He
states:

Although the literatures of the world have always been concerned with
knowledge for living together, literary scholars have yet to mine this
resource in any extensive and systematic fashion. Nor have they contrib-
uted any of this knowledge to recent public debates on the subject of
life. But literary criticism and critical theory should be at the forefront
of such discussions as we face the most important, and at the same time
riskiest, challenge of the twenty-first century: the search for paradigms of
coexistence that would suggest ways in which humans might live together
in peace and with mutual respect for one another’s differences. (989)

Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story responds to

Ette’s appeal in a number of ways. The book conducts an “extensive
and systematic” study of the “paradigms of coexistence” that contempo-
rary black British short fiction explores. Indeed, black British literature
seems to be of particular relevance at the present moment. Produced
by writers who are themselves in one way or another part of an earlier
wave of mass immigration to Europe, namely the postwar migration
4 B. JANSEN

from the Commonwealth to Britain, black British writing has reima-

gined community and suggested new models of social possibility since its
beginnings in the 1950s. We will see that the specific form of the black
British short story has proved particularly innovative in the experimen-
tation with alternative kinds of communal belonging. By foreground-
ing black British short fiction’s profound knowledge for living together
across cultural differences, this book wishes, as Ette demands, to con-
tribute to the public discourse on respectful, just, and peaceful ways of
communal living in Britain and beyond.

1  The Term ‘Black British Literature’

Any discussion of black British writing must start with a reflection on
the term ‘black British literature’ because it has been disputed by writ-
ers and critics alike and has come to mean very different things. Authors
like Salman Rushdie and Fred D’Aguiar early on warned that the term
tends to marginalise the writers thus categorised “in […] relation to
what might be called ‘white British literature’” (Ledent 2009, 16) and to
restrict them in the choice of their subject matter (Rushdie 1987, 37–38;
McLeod 2006, 95). More recent criticism points to the term’s overgen-
eralisation of the writers’ cultural diversity and its failure to “allow for
full consideration of individual ethnic identities” (Upstone 2010, 2; see
Arana 2009, xviii). Accordingly, several scholars differentiate between
‘black British’ literature penned by writers of African and Afro-Caribbean
descent, and ‘British Asian’ or ‘Asian British’ literature written by
authors of Asian or Indo-Caribbean descent (cf. Nasta 2002; Ellis 2007;
Innes 2008; Upstone 2010).
In contrast to such a racial conception of ‘black’ as denoting a writer’s
African heritage, I understand black in the British context as a political
and cultural term. Following scholars like Procter (2003), Stein (2004),
Arana (2007), and McLeod (2010), I use ‘black British literature’ as a
highly inclusive and heterogeneous category that refers to texts by “writ-
ers with African, South Asian, Indo-Caribbean, and African-Caribbean
backgrounds (backgrounds which could be further subdivided)” (Stein
2004, xiv). Such a wide understanding of black is indebted to the term’s
original usage as a “unifying framework” (Hall [1989] 1996, 441) for
Britain’s non-white population in their fight against racism (see Gilroy
[1987] 1995, 230, 236). My conception of black, then, acknowledges,
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

as Procter demands, black British literature’s “political, positional his-

tory” (2003, 10). Moreover, my broad definition of the term allows
for a comparative, transcultural approach to the short fiction originat-
ing from various non-white British backgrounds. It is only when “Asian
and African-Caribbean literature [are considered] collectively as a com-
munity of black writings” that the “rhetorical and intertextual relations”
(Procter 2003, 10) existing between these texts can be explored. In
order to distinguish my political and inclusive understanding of black,
which is unique to the British context, from the racial connotations that
the term carries in African American literary and cultural studies, black is
spelt with a lower-case initial throughout this monograph (cf. Low and
Wynne-Davies 2006, 3).

2   Black British Literature, Culture, and Politics

since 1948

This book does not consider black British short story writing in isolation,
but is interested in the cultural work that these short stories are doing
and seeks to outline their contribution to the contemporary discourse on
community. Therefore, it seems necessary to sketch the historical, polit-
ical, and cultural context in which black British literature has been pro-
duced in the second half of the twentieth and at the beginning of the
twenty-first centuries.
Historical evidence suggests that the history of black life in Britain
already begins with the Roman invasion in AD 43 when African soldiers
came to the island as part of the Roman armies (Innes 2008, 7). Yet, it is
the arrival of 492 West Indians on the SS Empire Windrush in 1948 that
marks a watershed in black British history. The Empire Windrush signals
the beginning of large-scale immigration from, above all, the Caribbean
Islands, Africa, and South East Asia. Following recruitment campaigns
from successive British postwar governments (Green 1990, 3; Innes
2008, 180–181), an unprecedented number of Commonwealth immi-
grants arrived in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s. Many migrants
readily embraced the British offer to fill empty jobs in the British textile,
shipbuilding, and automobile industries as well as the transport, health,
and postal services (Korte and Sternberg 1997, 17–18; Innes 2008, 180)
because it provided them with an escape from poverty, unemployment,
and political unrest in their newly independent home countries.
6 B. JANSEN

In 1951 the Caribbean and South Asian population in Britain

amounted to eighty thousand people, by 1971 it had already grown to
1.5 million.2 Within the next twenty years, it further increased to just
over three million people (Paxman 1999, 72). According to the 2011
Census for England and Wales, the last two decades again saw a con-
siderable rise in ethnic minority population: eight million people or 14%
of the population identify themselves either as belonging to ‘mixed or
multiple ethnic groups’, or as being ‘Asian’ or ‘Asian British’, ‘black’,
‘African’, ‘Caribbean’, or ‘black British’, or as belonging to any other
non-white ethnic group (ONS 2012). While Britain has become
“the most multiracial of European countries” (Phillips 2011, 216),
there are considerable geographical differences. The vast majority of
Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants live in the West
Midlands and the southeast of England (Paxman 1999, 73), with
London being the most ethnically diverse city in the UK (ONS 2012).
In Northern England, the West Yorkshire cities Leeds and Bradford but
also Manchester and Sheffield have significant BME populations, too (cf.
Elevation Networks 2016, 2). Conversely, Commonwealth immigrants
are “comparatively absent from Scotland and Wales” (Paxman 1999,
73; cf. ONS 2012). At present, more people of Commonwealth descent
are being born in Britain than migrate there, growing up as second- and
third-generation children of immigrants (Döring 2008, 164).
The substantial growth in ethnic minority population within a rela-
tively short amount of time has caused increasing racial tensions from
the very beginning, which have regularly culminated in violent race riots.
Commonwealth immigrants have suffered from discrimination in terms
of housing and employment,3 as well as open and concealed forms of
institutional racism. In his essay “The New Empire within Britain”
(1982), Rushdie argues that “every major institution in this country is
permeated by racial prejudice to some degree” ([1982] 1992, 134). He
famously observes:

It sometimes seems that the British authorities, no longer capable of

exporting governments, have chosen instead to import a new Empire, a
new community of subject peoples of whom they think, and with whom
they can deal, in very much the same way as their predecessors thought of
and dealt with “the fluttered folk and wild,” the “new-caught, sullen peo-
ples, half-devil and half-child,” who made up, for Rudyard Kipling, the
White Man’s Burden. (130)
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

Rushdie succinctly expresses the pervasiveness of racial prejudice in the

1980s when he contends that “Britain is now two entirely different
worlds, and the one you inhabit is determined by the colour of your
skin” (134). That this situation had not changed one decade later was
officially acknowledged by the Macpherson Report (1999). This report
enquired into the murder of eighteen-year-old Stephen Lawrence in
1993 and the seemingly half-hearted attempts of Scotland Yard to give
first aid to the victim and to solve the crime. The Macpherson Report
publicly denounced the police services and the criminal justice system as
prone to institutional racism (ch. 47; Colls 2002, 179–180).
At the beginning of the new millennium, race relations reached a new
crisis in the summer of 2001 when several violent riots erupted in the
Northern cities of Oldham, Burnley, and Bradford (Smyth 2007, 223).
Following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and particularly 7/7, there
has been a drastic increase in Islamophobia that has resulted in
discrimination and institutional racism against British Muslims (Hasan
2015). The more recent IS terror attacks in Europe have exacerbated
this anti-Muslim sentiment in Britain, and since 2009 several far-right,
Islamophobic, and xenophobic movements have been formed like the
English Defence League (EDL), Pegida UK, or the party Britain First.
The Institute of Race Relations (IRR) describes the current extent of
racial inequality, discrimination, and institutional racism thus:

In the twenty years since the death of Stephen Lawrence, we can report
that 106 people have lost their lives in […] racist attacks […], that black
people are twenty-eight times more likely than white to be stopped and
searched by the police […], that in 2009/10 black people were over three
times more likely than white to be arrested, that black and those of mixed
ethnicity are over twice as likely as whites to be unemployed, that three
quarters of 7-year-old Pakistani and Bangladeshi children are living in pov-
erty compared to one in four whites, and that those classifying themselves
as ‘Other Black’ are six times more likely than average to be admitted as
mental health inpatients. (IRR 2013)

In the aftermath of the Brexit referendum in 2016, the number of hate

crimes and racist attacks soared to new dimensions (Dodd 2016), and
the persistent structural disadvantagement of ethnic minorities came to
the fore of public debates once again. Had the black British writer Hanif
Kureishi, like many others, celebrated Britain previously as “a cultural
8 B. JANSEN

force in Europe […] because of [its] multiculturalism and diversity”

(quoted in McCrum 2014), one year after the referendum he worriedly
observes the development of an “utterly misconceived and misplaced and
vile” form of racism and Islamophobia, concluding that the middle class
“[is] more racist than [it] [has] ever been” (quoted in Clark 2017). The
black British writer Jackie Kay similarly notes “a lurch to xenophobia”
and a “very worrying insularity and racism” (quoted in Brooks 2016) in
contemporary Britain.
Until the 1990s, British politics had responded to racial tensions
mainly by passing Immigration Acts intended to reduce the number of
Commonwealth immigrants and by implementing Race Relations Acts
that made discrimination unlawful (cf. Green 1990, 408–409; Korte and
Sternberg 1997, 19–20; BBC 2006, 310). The most rigorous change to
civil law was implemented in 1981, when the British Nationality Act sub-
stituted the principle of the ius soli, or the allocation of citizenship by
place of birth, with the principle of partiality, thereby “discarding nine
hundred years of legal precedent” and transforming Britain into “a gene-
alogical community” (Baucom 1999, 8). Even though the Act repealed
one of the most ancient rights, “the birthright of every one of us, black
and white, and of our children and grandchildren,” it was passed with-
out arousing considerable opposition because, as Rushdie argues, it
seemed to be “expressly designed to deprive black and Asian Britons of
their citizenship rights” ([1982] 1992, 136). The atmosphere in which
the British Nationality Act was passed had been prepared, in a way, by
the infamous comments of two influential Conservative politicians. In
1968 Enoch Powell predicted in his “Rivers of Blood” Speech that mass
immigration will lead to racial violence (see Baucom 1999, 15–24), and
ten years later the future prime minister Margaret Thatcher warned that
Britain “might be rather swamped by people with a different culture”
(quoted in Korte and Sternberg 1997, 23).
Starting in 1997, New Labour introduced a radical change in the
political discourse on immigration. The party evoked Britain’s alleged tra-
dition of liberalism, tolerance, and cultural exchange in order to envision
a multicultural ‘Cool Britannia’ that celebrates cultural diversity (Paxman
1999, 238–240). In 2001 Foreign Secretary Robin Cook hailed plural-
ism in his famous “Chicken Tikka Masala” Speech as “a unique asset for
Britain in a modern world” and he urged British people to “create an
open and inclusive society that welcomes incomers for their contribu-
tion to our growth and prosperity.” Such a multicultural ‘New Britain’,
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

prime minister Tony Blair emphasised, will become “a beacon to the

world of racial equality” (quoted in Bevan and Rufford 1999, 232).
Yet, David Cameron’s speech at the Munich Security Conference
in 2011 marked a renewed change in tone. Cameron openly declared
that “the doctrine of state multiculturalism” has failed in Britain. In
the speech that coincided with one of the biggest anti-Muslim EDL
marches in England, Cameron controversially judged the condition of
British multiculturalism by focusing on British Muslim extremists only.
He attributed the increase in Islamist extremists to multiculturalism’s
“passive,” “hands-off tolerance” towards others that has “encour-
aged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and
apart from the mainstream.” He called for an “active, muscular liberal-
ism” that promotes a predefined set of British values to which all citi-
zens should adhere in order to forge a “strong society” with a “strong
identity” (Cameron 2011). By expecting ethnic minorities to assimilate
to the status quo set by white Britain, Cameron’s rhetoric effectively
referred back to the 1970s and 1980s. In the context of the Global
Financial Crisis and the severe cuts to the British welfare system, this
rhetoric fell on fertile ground. Ironically, it seems to have paved the way
for the success of the leave campaign in the 2016 referendum, which
promised ‘to get our country back’ from Europe as much as from immi-
grants and British-born ethnic minorities.
The periodic revival of racial tensions and anti-immigration sentiment
in the course of the past seventy years indicates that the ‘Windrush gen-
eration’ and its successors have posed a severe challenge to traditional
anglocentric and monocultural notions of Britishness. Already in 1982,
Rushdie astutely remarks that “Britain is undergoing a critical phase of
its postcolonial period” because it is faced with “a crisis of the whole
culture, of the society’s entire sense of itself” ([1982] 1992, 129). As
Commonwealth immigrants have visibly challenged the myth of white
Britishness, British residents have had to learn that a nation is “an
imagined political community” (Anderson [1983] 1991, 6) rather than
an essentialist given. It is a deliberate construction that functions primar-
ily through the “invention of tradition” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983),
and therefore remains continuously open to renegotiation, reinvention,
and redefinition. The difficulty of adjusting to this new conception of
nationhood has been increased by the massive changes that British
society has been undergoing in the postwar period. Internationally,
Britain ceased to be a major global player as imperial, military, and
10 B. JANSEN

manufacturing power; and it entered new alliances, becoming a member

of the European Union in 1973. But, Colls reminds us, Britain has also
faced “fundamental shifts [at home] in contemporary patterns of work,
family, authority, household, residence, region, communication” and, of
course, “ethnic and religious composition” (2002, 4).
Since its beginnings in the 1950s, black British literature and culture
have partaken in the struggle for a polycultural British society. Black
British artists have contested the prevalent understanding of Britishness
and added an entirely new perspective to the established canon of white,
anglocentric, and middle-class British art. Although “black and Asian writ-
ers […] have made a home in Britain and made their voices heard” since
1750—the earliest being Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, and Dean
Mahomed—, in A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain C.L.
Innes persuasively shows that the literature produced before 1948 does
“not so much [constitute] a tradition, as little is passed on from one writer
to the next, as a series of recurring preoccupations and tropes” (2008, 2).
Thus, the mass immigration from the Commonwealth in the wake of the
Empire Windrush heralded the beginning of a new era in the history of
black writing (ibid., 233–234). Contrary to earlier black authors who had
chiefly addressed a white British audience as individual representatives of
their cultures of origin, in the second half of the twentieth century writers
“increasingly spoke of and to a black and south Asian community within
Britain” (234). Their literary texts have been less concerned with the rec-
reation of “a community distant in time and place”; instead, they have
intended “to create [a] community here and now in Britain” (ibid.).
In its earliest phase, the 1950s and 1960s, black British literature was
predominantly written by Caribbean and Asian immigrants who “worked
their experiences of settling in London into partly autobiographical nov-
els” (Reichl 2002, 22). Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) is
a classic example of the literature produced by these writers, who were
usually single men who considered themselves transient residents in
Britain (Innes 2008, 238).
It was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that a specifically
black British identity and culture emerged, initiating the second phase
of black British literature. Against the backdrop of anti-immigration leg-
islation, particularly the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1968 and
the Immigration Act of 1971, and influenced by the US Black Power
movement, the term ‘black British’ was coined by the Caribbean Artists
Movement (Reichl 2002, 34; Stein 2004, 12). This London-based
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

group of West Indian writers and artists was instrumental to “the transi-
tion from West Indian to black British arts” (Walmsley 2010, 90). Stein
explains:

At its inception […] black British was used in an overarching sense, refer-
ring to distinct groups of West Indian migrants from Trinidad, Jamaica,
Guyana, and Barbados, etc., with distinct backgrounds. It thus included
African Guyanese, Indo-Guyanese, and Sino-Guyanese people, for exam-
ple. Later the concept was used to include migrant groups from other
parts of the world. (2004, 12)

In his seminal essay “New Ethnicities” (1989), Hall stresses that the
term ‘black’ was coined in order to reference non-white minorities’
“common experience of racism and marginalization in Britain,” and “to
provide the organising category of a new politics of resistance, among
groups and communities with, in fact, very different histories, traditions
and ethnic identities” ([1989] 1996, 441; see Gilroy [1987] 1995, 236).
Contrary to the US American context, in Britain ‘black’ thus became a
political category that united people of Caribbean, African, and Asian
descent. As such, it subverted the logic of racial discourse. Mercer
elaborates:

The rearticulation of /black/ as an empowering signifier of Afro-Asian

alliances was initially a subversive act of disarticulation in which the nodal
metaphor of racist ideology (white/non-white) was displaced out of its
fixed and centred position and appropriated into a counter-hegemonic
discourse of black community resistance. (1994, 256)

This second phase of black British literary and cultural production crit-
icised “the way blacks were positioned as the unspoken and invisible
‘other’ of predominantly white aesthetic and cultural discourses” (Hall
[1989] 1996, 441). Black artists and cultural workers demanded “access
to the rights to representation” (442) in order to become the subjects of
cultural representations of black lives. They intended to use this access
to establish “a ‘positive’ black imagery” that contests the “fetishization,
objectification and negative figuration” of images of blacks in white
British culture (ibid.). Therefore, the few artists who gained access to
British cultural discourses “[had] to carry the burden of being ‘repre-
sentative’” (Mercer 1994, 236). They were “expected to speak for the
12 B. JANSEN

black communities as if she or he were its duly appointed public ‘repre-

sentative’” (240, cf. 248). Hence, black British literature of this period
tends to portray blacks uncritically and positively in a realist aesthetic
(Procter 2004, 127, 130), adhering to the “unspoken internal impera-
tive that, as black subjects, we should never discuss our ‘differences’ in
public: that we should always defer and delay our criticism by doing our
‘dirty laundry’ in private” (Mercer 1994, 238). Dub poet Linton Kwesi
Johnson’s collections Voices of the Living and the Dead (1974), Dread
Beat an Blood (1975), and especially Inglan Is a Bitch (1980) are instruc-
tive examples of the positive, uniform, and highly politicised portrayal of
black Britons prevalent at the time.
The mid-1980s saw “a significant shift […] in black cultural politics”
(Hall [1989] 1996, 441) that ushered in a new phase of black British
cultural productivity. Functioning as a “unifying framework” in the
1970s and early 1980s, black identity had “[become] ‘hegemonic’ over
other ethnic/racial identities” (ibid.) and, in fact, had come to operate in
essentialist terms, confronting “an essentially bad white subject” with “an
essentially good black subject” (Procter 2004, 123). According to Hall,
this “innocent notion of the essential black subject” came to an end as
people became increasingly aware of the fact that “‘black’ is essentially a
politically and culturally constructed category, which cannot be grounded
in a set of fixed trans-cultural or transcendental racial categories and
which therefore has no guarantees in nature” ([1989] 1996, 443).
Accordingly, in this third phase black British literature and cultural
production are characterised by a postmodern aesthetic that questions
the notion of authenticity and reveals ‘black’ as “a discursively produced
category constructed through representation” (Procter 2004, 127). As
black British artists gained more and more access to cultural discourses,
the ‘burden of representation’ became lighter (ibid., 129) and art-
ists increasingly refused “to represent the black experience in Britain as
monolithic, self-contained, sexually stabilised and always ‘right on’—in
a word, always and only ‘positive’” (Hall [1989] 1996, 449). For, as
Rushdie argues,

the real gift which we can offer our communities is not the creation of a
set of stereotyped positive images to counteract the stereotyped negative
ones, but simply the gift of treating black and Asian characters in a way
that white writers seem very rarely able to do, that is to say as fully realised
human beings, as complex creatures, good, bad, bad, good. (1987, 41)
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