Black british Writing

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.

In 1983, Salman Rushdie observed (in an essay on 'Commonwealth Literature') that black British literature does not exist, that "the category is a chimera" comprising different traditions united only by their proponents' pigmentation alongside their British citizenship or residence. The label 'black British' has often been seen as reductive and divisive, notably by literary practitioners; yet it has had wide currency since the 1980s. Writers cast as 'black British' frequently object that, despite the challenge implied in combining these two adjectives, the phrase suggests a marginalization in its relation to what might be called 'white British literature' -a much less common tag. Some resent being seen as an appendage to mainstream literature, or complain, like Fred D'Aguiar in a 1986 piece entitled "Against Black British Literature", that the assumptions of authenticity underlying the label confine their creative imagination which should "[know] no boundaries". These questions are far-reaching.