Black British literature

The pre-publication praise Natasha Brown received for her debut novel Assembly (2021) from renowned writers like Bernardine Evaristo or Ali Smith is quite remarkable. The author had been virtually unknown to the larger public before winning one of the London Writers Awards in the literary fiction category in 2019. As a young Black British woman of Jamaican descent, Brown meets the criteria defined by Spread the Word, the organisation behind the Awards assisting underrepresented writers to develop and publish their work, with an overall aim of reflecting diversity and enabling inclusivity. Assembly highlights the discriminating intersections of race, gender and class in today’s Britain and tells a story of social ascendancy, of a Black female narrator-protagonist who has overcome her lower-class background and has managed to obtain a top position in a London-based finance company. While this partially invites an autobiographical reading – Brown, who holds a Cambridge degree in mathematics, also made her career in the finance industry – Assembly is a far cry from celebrating the glory of making it to the top and instead exposes this goal as utterly questionable.

“Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi”. Leetsch J., entry in The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: Postwar and Contemporary English Writing and Culture, 1945-present. Eds. Valerie Kaneko-Lucas, Kerry Myler, Deirdre Osborne, Judith Rahn and Jenni Ramone. 14 May 2019.

The History of Mary Prince was published by 1829 under the supervision of Thomas Pringle and Susanna Strickland, two white members of the Anti-slavery Society. When reading the text, it is clear a great amount of rhetorical devices are being deployed, by Prince, but mostly by the editors of her book, in order to appeal to the white English majority. The book uses religion as ethos and moral credibility, tracking Prince’s journey to religious conversion in a way that seems to parallel her journey through slavery to freedom. The book also uses white, English gender expectations and projects them onto the novel, significantly altering the lived experiences of Prince in order to project a credible, “appropriate” abolitionist narrative. Although this book is an important biography promulgating a first hand account of the horrors of slavery and marks an important event in the history of the abolition movement, the strategic rhetorical devices of the book can be used to illuminate to the audience how it also is entrenched in the same presuppositions and assumptions of white supremacy in certain ways and cater to a white audience, ironically censoring a black woman.

In her novels, Andrea Levy addresses the history of post-war Caribbean immigration to Britain. In Every Light in
the House Burnin’ (1994) the author presents a Jamaican family who relocate from the Caribbean and settle in
the United Kingdom. The passage they undertake sailing across the seas stands as illustrative for the journey that
many former British colonial subjects have made after the Second World War in response to the calls for help in
rebuilduiding the war-stricken British economy and in order to seek a better life in Britain. They follow the typical pattern; the father of the family arrives first and his relatives join him later. The novel is set in London in the 1960s and 1970s and has at its centre what has been termed the Windrush generation: those who arrived with the wave of immigration following the docking of the SS Empire Windrush at Tilbury on 22nd June 1948.

“Mr Fox by Helen Oyeyemi”. Leetsch J., entry in The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: Postwar and Contemporary English Writing and Culture, 1945-present. Eds. Valerie Kaneko-Lucas, Kerry Myler, Deirdre Osborne, Judith Rahn and Jenni Ramone. 03 September 2019.

The emergence of queer diaspora studies has demanded increasing attention to the ways in which women writers have challenged the heterocentrism of dominant conceptions of diaspora. The theoretical intersection of queer studies with diaspora and black studies in relatively recent years has produced a vital reassessment of the black studies project. In the attempt to reconceptualize black queer and black diaspora, Rinaldo Walcott, in particular, has stressed the importance of a broader geographical and comparative framework, and offered crucial insights into the spatial redefinition of queer studies. Walcott's new black queer theory provides a particularly useful framework in this article to analyse the poetic work of Patience Agbabi in Transformatrix (2000) and Bloodshot Monochrome (2008) as queer poetic praxis. A British poet of Nigerian ancestry, Agbabi combines her experience as a spoken-word artist and performer with her literary background as an Oxford-educated poet. Straddling the British lyric tradition and performance poetry, her work explores the sonnet form while revealing the complexities of gender and sexuality. This article agues that, as she steps beyond safe boundaries of literary conventions in a creative interplay of formal constraint and experimentation, Agbabi queers the sonnet form, destabilizing normative gay, lesbian, black, men's and women's identities.

Abstract: This paper examines the gaps and bridges between the visual and textual aspects of the poetry of Grace Nichols. Based on  the representative texts from her Paint Me a Poem (2004) and Picasso,
I Want My Face Back (2009), the paper examines the inspiration of the Tate Gallery collection on Nichols, the museum’s first poet in residence. The paper further focuses on the ethnic elements that were included in the texts so as to contextualise the poems within British Caribbean diasporic literature. Grace Nichols, born in Guyana but residing in Britain since 1977, incorporates the lyric voice of the immigrant community, paying special attention to the possibilities of Standard English
as opposed to Caribbean Creole. Therefore, the paper finally evaluates Nichols’s amalgam of art, language and diaspora.
Keywords: British post-war poetry; post-colonial poetry; Caribbean poetry; Grace Nichols; diaspora; Dora Maar; Pablo Picasso; Paint Me a Poem; Picasso, I Want My Face Back

Family relationships are central to the way Caribbean writers define their identities. This is particularly the case of Caryl Phillips. Most of his fiction presents the family as a site of disruption, but also includes examples of surrogate parenthood, which reflect the complexity of the writer's identity conundrum. The discussion focuses on Phillips's 2003 novel A Distant Shore.

Two centuries after the first autobiography by an enslaved African was published in London, black British authors revisit the historical issue of slavery by imagining the life stories of (former) slaves. They develop the African American genre of the neo-slave narrative by focusing on Britain’s involvement in slavery as well as on the importance of slave authorship to the historical emancipation process and the present-day ‘rememory’ of slavery. Framed by a synoptic review of the politics and aesthetics of the slave and neo-slave narrative and a preamble discussion of J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, this article discusses the metafictional emphasis on slave authorship in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge, one of Britain’s pioneering neo-slave narratives, and in two more recent examples produced in the context of the 2007 commemorations of the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade: Jackie Kay’s poetical radio-play The Lamplighter and Andrea Levy’s metafictional novel The Long Song. These three bl...

This article approaches transnational poetry through the recent engagement of medieval studies with the theoretical frame of postcolonial studies, which raises questions about periodization, contact zones and axes of power. The intersection of postcolonial theory and medievalism has uncovered global interconnections across time and space through a transnational dialectics investigating the contemporaneity of the Middle Ages and modernity. The article traces the transnational affiliations connecting Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath” and the work of two contemporary women poets of the African diaspora, British-born poet of Nigerian origin, Patience Agbabi, and Jamaican Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, who have recontextualized the well-known character of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the space of the metropolitan African diaspora. While Breeze’s poem, published in 2000, imagines that “The Wife of Bath speaks in Brixton Market”, Agbabi has reworked the Wife’s vivid language in the voice of a Nigerian businesswoman in “What do women like bes’?” from her 2014 collection Telling Tales. The article suggests that, by exposing the transnational flows and “crossover” skills already present in Chaucer, Agbabi and Breeze engage in a continuing conversation which contributes to our understanding of both medieval England and contemporary Britain as, in Bill Ashcroft’s term, “transnation”.

In this article I discuss Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (2019) as a transmodern narrative that gives voice to a marginalised group of black women living in Britain. Written in a hybrid style that combines prose and poetry and eschewing punctuation and long sentences, the novel interweaves sundry stories from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century set in countries ranging from Africa, the Caribbean, and America to Britain. This networked structure exposes transtemporal and transnational patterns of diversity, connectedness and relationality, as well as the distinctive genealogy of black British women and their maternal empowerment. I argue that the resilience of the characters in the face of social, racial and gender marginalisation springs from their empathic relatedness and solidarity. This emphasis on the importance of care for the other highlights the need for improving not only women’s rights and socioeconomic opportunities but of benefiting humanity on a broader scale.

ABSTRACT:
In characterizing the desperate journeys undertaken by African and Haitian refugees as today’s “middle passages,” Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore and Edwidge Danticat’s “Children of the Sea” complicate the idea of a single origin to a transatlantic black diaspora. If, during an era of black power and nation-building, the middle passage signified a fundamental connection with Africa, the term is more recently used to describe multiple crossings that transform the meaning of diaspora into a vital and ongoing process. These crossings do not coalesce into a single narrative of black migration in which the trauma of slavery has been overcome. Rather, the temporal simultaneity of past and present suggests a narrative of history as repetition. Both works of fiction transform received images from a slave past in order to critique the present treatment of black asylum seekers. A Distant Shore deploys the stalled temporality of the middle passage for staging the impossibility of diasporic community in post 9/11 Britain. But even as this novel redraws the oceanic map of the transatlantic slave trade to include continental Europe and Great Britain, Africa exists outside of that imperial history and geography. “Children of the Sea” uses the simultaneity of past and present and the symbolic value of the middle passage as a space of death to critique an oppressive Haitian regime and the treatment of Haitian boat people by their Caribbean and American neighbors. It also interrupts a stalled temporality with the prophetic time of vodou beliefs for shifting the meaning of the middle passage from death to life in a dyaspora that stretches across the Caribbean Sea.

Starting from the vocal nature of Crossing the River, the article looks at Caryl Phillips's archives housed at the Beinecke Library and thereby attempts to retrieve the voices that did not make it into the book, but which are nonetheless important pieces in the writers's imaginative universe. This article will refer to three thematically linked radio plays as well as an early draft of the third section of the 1993 novel.

The Cambridge Companion to British Poetry, 1945-2010 brings together sixteen essays that explore the full diversity of British poetry since the Second World War, a period of significant achievement in which varied styles and approaches have flourished. As a comprehensive critical, literary-historical and scholarly guide, this Companion offers not only new readings of a wide range of poets but a detailed account of the contexts in which their verse was written and received. Focusing on famous and neglected names alike, from Dylan Thomas to John Agard, leading scholars provide readers with insight into the ongoing importance and profundity of post-war poetry.

Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners is a text preoccupied with movement—it maps a London transformed by West Indian immigrants as they search for work, travel to and from their jobs, move in and out of rented apartments, and tour the city’s public spaces in search of women. This emphasis on mapping has led many critics to engage with the text as a work of community-building. Indeed, The Lonely Londoners is an enunciative text; it produces the community it describes in the act ofwriting, recording and mapping its voices and movements. However, Selvon’s novel traces not only mobility, but immobility. It charts where his characters might go and where they might not, where they are free to move and where the colour bar literally bars that movement. Put simply, The Lonely Londoners maps freedom and its limitations. The novel’s
preoccupation with movement thus marks a preoccupation with freedom, one that finally functions to query and problematize a straightforward reading of movement that equates liberty with mobility. In the following, I argue that throughout The Lonely Londoners, the writing of community
not only produces community, but also queries the movement of that community and the political objects around which it mobilizes.

The first full-length study of Grace Nichols's work. Rather than seeing Nichols's 'Caribbeaness' and 'Britishness' as dual affliations, simplistically opposed, it argues that Nichols's writing is more productively read in terms of a series of border-crossings. Nichols's major female protagonists are seen as epic journeyers travelling, literally and imaginatively, across different cultural and psychic landscapes. It also shows how Nichols's poetry explores the boundaries of race, class and gender as part of the lived experience of being a black woman in Britain. Specific focuses include the critical neglect of black British Woman's writing, the problems and potentialities of different feminist reading strategies, the role of rewriting history and revisioning myth in Nichols's poetry and the nature of diaspora, cultural hybridity and the complex meaning of home for the migrant writer

In Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007), Sarah Brouillette argues that, as against “the supposed dominant orthodoxy of anti-authorialism in literary studies” (173), successful marketing of postcolonial literature depends on — indeed requires — “biographical authenticity” so that postcolonial writers can act as valid interpreters of an authenticated location for an Anglo-American audience “schooled in multiculturalism.”
Brouillette’s perception that the marketing of postcolonial writing depends on the coincidence between literary material and the biographical self of its author raises fascinating questions when it comes to examining “postcolonial” biographies and autobiographies highlighting the ambiguities and impossibilities inherent in any “referential pact” (cf. Lejeune). Such ambiguities are at play in Hanif Kureishi’s My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father (2004), in which the well-known British Asian author narrativizes his ambivalent relationship with his father and retraces the latter’s trajectory from British India to the UK of the 1960s and 1970s.
What is compelling about Kureishi’s book is that he both relies on memory and on two unpublished novels by his late father to reconstruct the latter’s life, thus “imagining around [others’] imagination” (2004: 238), as he phrases it, that is, embracing fiction — not only memory — as a valid starting point for his transgenerational endeavour. It has been noted that “Kureishi, as a reader, approaches his father’s novels in a way that he would doubtless object to if his own fiction were raided for its autobiographical content” (Thomas 2006: 189). Yet, I show in this article that the dubious quest for “biographical authenticity” that underpins Kureishi’s “reading project” is constantly kept in check by the metafictional moves of his “writing project”, which, in turn, allows him to problematize, rather than play up to, the specific biographic requirements of “postcoloniality”.

This document is a collation of six columns, written with Karen Sands O'Connor. These columns were published in 'Books for Keeps', the British children's books periodical, in 2018. The columns are presented in order, from Issue 228-233 inclusive. The full issues can be accessed here: http://booksforkeeps.co.uk

The name of the one that disappeared must have gotten inscribed some place else." (Derrida, Specters of Marx, 4) "What does it mean to follow a ghost? And what if this came down to being followed by it, always persecuted perhaps by the chase we are leading?" (Derrida, Specters of Marx, 10) "The archive: if we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in times to come. Perhaps." (Derrida, Archive Fever, p.36)

Many of the poems in Jay Bernard’s Surge (2019) were inspired by Bernard’s 2017 residency at the George Padmore Institute, London, an experience that allowed them to access the Institute’s unique archives on black British history. This article considers both the politics and aesthetics of Surge as a collection which addresses the social and material in/exclusions experienced by black Britons within some specific historical and socio-cultural contexts, including the 1981 New Cross and 2017 Grenfell fires in London. Drawing on theoretical insights such as Derrida’s concepts of ‘hauntology’ and ‘archive fever’, this article argues that the notion of the archive is central to both the aesthetic and political project of Surge. The varied formal and aesthetic experimentation of many of the poems allow Bernard to ask some challenging questions of British society and its relation to its history, as well as the complex tension between public histories and personal accounts. Bernard harnesses the power of poetry to queer or unsettle other kinds of discourse (including orthodox historical narrative) by imaginatively re-embodying hitherto disembodied voices, enabling them to speak in the interstices between private memory and public history in some unique (and strikingly affecting) ways.

Due to the large-scale global transformations of the 20th century, migration literature has become a vibrant genre over the last decades. In these novels, issues of transcultural identity and belonging naturally feature prominently. This study takes a closer look at the ways in which the idea of family informs processes of identity construction. It explores changing roles and meanings of the diasporic family as well as intergenerational family relations in a migration setting in order to identify the specific challenges, problems, and possibilities that arise in this context. This book builds on insights from different fields of family research (e.g. sociology, psychology, communication studies, memory studies) to provide a conceptual framework for the investigation of synchronic and diachronic family constellations and connections. The approach developed in this study not only sheds new light on contemporary British migration literature but can also prove fruitful for analyses of families in literature more generally. By highlighting the relevance and multifaceted nature of doing family, this study also offers new perspectives for transcultural memory studies.

Abstract: British-Guyanese poet John Agard asks, “Explain yuself / wha yu mean / when yu say half-caste.” Similarly to other Anglophone Caribbean poets living in Great Britain, Agard is concerned with themes of assimilation and racial discrimination. In his poetry he frequently engages Creole to voice social and racial inequality. He claims that he “do[es not] need no hammer / to mash up yu grammar.” This paper examines the language Agard utilises to show the special potential of Caribbean literature in exile. In addition, the paper concentrates on his critical views of British xenophobic cultural stereotypes. Such stereotypes are evaluated through the lens of diaspora and are contextualized within the canon of British postcolonial literature. Furthermore, the paper examines the ethnic aspects of his poetry.
Keywords: John Agard; diaspora; British poetry; Caribbean poetry; black British literature; xenophobia; alterity; Creole; retrospective hallucination

This essay enriches current black queer British and black queer diasporic scholarship by foregrounding the relevance of home-making, affect, and queer ageing for these contexts. I begin by situating relevant diasporic and performative aspects of queer home-making, discussing contributions by both scholars and writers. As a result, “home-making” arises in tension between variable meanings, including home-making as bound up with heteronormative privilege, as facilitating queer heterotopias of security and happiness, queer home-making as unsafe and/or jeopardized by (internalized) homophobia. I complement my conceptualizations with an intersectional discussion of two novels: Jackie Kay’s Trumpet (1998) intervenes in a transphobic 1990s Anglo-American context, queering and post-colonializing the biography of Jazz musician Billy Tipton by transferring his life story to the UK and giving him an African father. Bernardine Evaristo's Mr Loverman (2013) queers the home-making project of the Windrush generation, depicting its elderly characters’ struggles to reconcile their secret long-term queer love relationship with the expectations of their Caribbean community, and with their own increasing desire to make a queer home together. The novels offer a combined writing back to heteronormative ideologies of home-making in a transatlantic, black British context and to disempowering narratives of queer diaspora. They position queer ageing, frequently couched in silences and/or heterosexist othering, as central for demands and representations of queer viability, and thus for legitimizing queer claims to citizenship. The novels thus offer diverse contributions to an ongoing process of making a home for queerness in imaginations of black Britain. Read in the current context of surging racism, populism, and homophobia, they also stand as stark reminders of the diversity and validity of non-normative life paths as well as of the legitimacy and humanity of those seeking “liveable lives” in Britain and elsewhere.

This is a study of the female diasporic imagination. It sets out to investigate how Anglophone black women writers and performers respond to the imbalances, pressures and crises of contemporary globalization by querying the boundaries between two separate conceptual domains: love and space.

Making Love, Making Worlds breaks new ground by systematically bringing together critical love studies with research into the cultures of migration, diaspora and globalization. Examining a notable tendency among current black feminist writers, poets and performers to insist on the affective dimension of world-making, the book ponders strategies of reconfiguring postcolonial discourses. Indeed, my analyses of literary works and medial performances by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, Shailja Patel and Warsan Shire reveal an urge of moving beyond a familiar insistence on processes of alienation, displacement or rupture and towards a new emphasis on connection and intimacy. The book argues that, by attending to the deeply personal and relational while also depicting structural and geographical displacement in a time of global flows and refugee movements, these authors and performers strive to create possible inhabitable worlds. However, Making Love, Making Worlds makes a point of tracing the complexities of the voices and visions studied, of foregrounding their ability to engage with the harmful as well as the reparative results that come to be produced at the intersections of love, migration, and globalization.

Informed by a wide theoretical interest, the study combines careful literary analyses with in-depth discussions of cultural and socio-historical contexts. It does not only consider the world-making powers of the old novel form in the third millennium but also ponders the formative effect of new digital media. In holding on to the potential radicality of love, Making Love, Making Worlds makes a case for re-articulating an often-dismissed approach that originated in critical black feminist love studies. While theorisations of space necessarily abound in discussions of postcolonial literatures, my focus on affect introduces a very different entry point for analysis.

My choice of texts – ranging from Adichie’s spectacularly successful Americanah and Smith’s well-known London novels via Oyeyemi’s queer vampire fiction to the poems and performances of Patel and Shire – is due to the pronounced but varying significance they give to the interrelationships of space and love, of migration and affect. The works selected for close analysis provide an opportunity of studying various African diasporic imaginaries in concert with one another: Nigerian-American, Caribbean, Nigerian-British, Somali-British, and Kenyan-American. Read alongside each other, the selected novels, poems and performances suggest a newly and differently connected global imaginary – an alternative to dominant constructions of the present world and a site of resistance to oppressive hegemonic dynamics at work on national as well as global levels.