Black British and British Asian Fiction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Morey
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Black History ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Hanif Kureishi ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Black British ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
Caryl Phillips ◽  
Zadie Smith

This chapter explores some issues in black British and British Asian fiction since the 1980s. It shows certain key characteristics of the white British apprehension of those non-white imperial subjects who, after decolonization, were to arrive, in increasing numbers, on British shores. This chapter takes a sample of five writers — three women and two men — and explores those key recurring themes that give a unity to their otherwise very different novels. Through the work of Caryl Phillips, Andrea Levy, Zadie Smith, Hanif Kureishi, and Monica Ali, this chapter traces the persistence of issues of race and racism. The chapter also considers the importance of recuperating black history, the rise of identity politics, and the tenacity with which the gaze of the racial Other — whether white on black or black on white — fixes its object in the expectation of certain forms of limiting and supposedly ‘authentic’ behaviour.

Black Travel Writing

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel Kalous
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Barack Obama ◽  
Autobiographical Narratives ◽  
Black British ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
Caryl Phillips

What does it mean for Black diasporic writers to travel to Africa? Focusing on the period between the 1990s and 2010s, Isabel Kalous examines autobiographical narratives of travel to Africa by African American and Black British authors. She places the texts within the long tradition of Black diasporic engagement with the continent, scrutinizes the significance of Black mobility, and demonstrates that travel writing serves as a means to negotiate questions of identity, belonging, history, and cultural memory. To provide a framework for the analyses of contemporary narratives, her study outlines the emergence, development, and key characteristics of the multifaceted genre of Black travel writing. Authors discussed include, among others, Saidiya Hartman, Barack Obama, and Caryl Phillips.

scholarly journals “He Was Shot because America Will Not Give Up on Racism”: Martin Luther King Jr. and the African American Civil Rights Movement in British Schools

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
MEGAN HUNT ◽  
BENJAMIN HOUSTON ◽  
BRIAN WARD ◽  
NICK MEGORAN
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
British History ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black British ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Martin Luther King

This article examines how Martin Luther King Jr. and the movement with which he is often synonymous are taught in UK schools, as well as the consequences of that teaching for twenty-first-century understandings of Britain's racial past and present. The UK's King-centric approach to teaching the civil rights movement has much in common with that in the US, including an inattention to its transnational coordinates. However, these shared (mis)representations have different histories, are deployed to different ends, and have different consequences. In the UK, study of the African American freedom struggle often happens in the absence of, and almost as a surrogate for, engagement with the histories of Britain's own racial minorities and imperial past. In short, emphasis on the apparent singularity of US race relations and the achievements of the mid-twentieth-century African American freedom struggle facilitates cultural amnesia regarding the historic and continuing significance of race and racism in the UK. In light of the Windrush scandal and the damning 2018 Royal Historical Society report on “Race, Ethnicity and Equality in UK History,” this article argues both for better, more nuanced and more relevant teaching of King and the freedom struggle in British schools, and for much greater attention to black British history in its own right.

‘No Straight Answers’: Writing in the Margins, Finding Lost Heroes

2009 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mojisola Adebayo ◽  
Valerie Mason-John ◽  
Deirdre Osborne
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Black Woman ◽  
Environmental Degradation ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Black British ◽  
Cross Dressing ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Contemporary Writing ◽  
Universal Themes

Mojisola Adebayo and Valerie Mason-John are two distinctive voices in contemporary writing and performance, representing an Afro-Queer diasporic heritage through the specific experience of being black, British, and lesbian. Creating continuities from contorted or erased histories (personal, social, and cultural), their drama demonstrates both Afro-centric and European theatrical influences, which in Mason-John's case is further consolidated in her polemic, poetry, and prose. Like Britain's most innovative and prominent contemporary black woman dramatist, debbie tucker green, they reach beyond local or national identity politics to represent universal themes and to centralize black women's experiences. With subject matter that includes royal families, the care system, racial cross-dressing, and global ecology, Adebayo and Mason-John have individually forged a unique aesthetic and perspective in work which links environmental degradation with social disenfranchisement and travels to the heart of whiteness along black-affirming imaginative routes. Deirdre Osborne is a lecturer in drama at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and has published essays on the work of black British dramatists and poets, including Kwame Kwei-Armah, Dona Daley, debbie tucker green, Lennie James, Lemn Sissay, SuAndi, and Roy Williams. She is the editor of Hidden Gems (London: Oberon Books, 2008), a collection of plays by black British dramatists.

Writing Black Scotland

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph H. Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Racial Diversity ◽  
Black Politics ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Critical Fields ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
National Space ◽  
Black British ◽  
Politics Of Race ◽  
British State ◽  
Black Britain

Writing Black Scotland: Race, Nation and the Devolution of Black Britain examines Blackness in devolutionary Scottish writing, bringing together two established contemporary literary-critical fields – Black British and Scottish literature – with significant implications for both. The book focuses on key literary works from the 1970s to the early 2000s, which emerge from and shape a period of history defined by post-imperial adjustment: a new British state politics of race centred on multiculturalism, the changing status of the Union, and the expanding racial diversity of Scotland itself. The book suggests that the larger world context of Black politics shaped the priorities of Scottish writers in the 1980s and 1990s, at the same time that Black writers were rising to prominence in Scottish letters. Following the referendum on devolved government in 1997, race and racism became even more important negotiations in the national space, evidenced by case studies of three texts directly addressing Blackness in Scotland. This ‘devolving’ of Black Britain parallels the shifting constitutional arrangements in contemporary Britain, implicating not only Scotland but Black British literary studies, which have largely left the integrity of the Union undisturbed. Writing Black Scotland critiques that unifying Britishness, recognisable in a confident state multiculturalism, with reference to the constitutional challenge from Scotland.

scholarly journals Racism in the 21st Century: Debbie Tucker Green’s Eye for Ear

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Belgin Bağırlar
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Black Parents ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Political Issue ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Royal Court ◽  
Black British ◽  
Royal Court Theatre

Does equality exist in the 21st century, or, are minorities still forced to fight for equality? In nineteenth century, Britain, racism was blatant in all spheres of cultural, social, and economic life to the point that it crossed over into literature and theatre. In 1978, UNESCO adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Forty years have since passed, but has it made any difference? Contemporary British playwright Debbie Tucker Green’s Eye for Ear (2018), staged at the Royal Court Theatre, reminds us that racism and inequality is still a key social-political issue. This three-act, avant-garde, colloquial play depicts how both African-Americans as well as Black British people still live with racism today. It also highlights racism’s linguistic and legal past. Tucker Green particularly focuses on the violent aspect of that racism through the lens of different characters: an academic, a black student, a black boy, and black parents. The play concludes with crushed hope, for it deduces that Caucasians both in the United States and in Great Britain still dominate practically every facet of society. This study will examine Green’s Ear for Eye, racial discrimination in the 21st century, and how Tucker Green projects her views upon her work through the theory of race and racism.

scholarly journals Barriers, borders and crossing in two postmodern novels: Caryl's Phillips's The Nature of Blood and Zadie Smith's White Teeth

2008 ◽  
pp. 207
Author(s):  
Cecilia Acquarone
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Caryl Phillips ◽  
Zadie Smith ◽  
White Teeth

The present article is a study of the novels the Nature of Blood by Caryl Phillips and White Teeth by Zadie Smith as paradigmatic examples of postmodern writing as well as of two different responses that the movement has elicited in our times. While The Nature of Blood deals tragically with the postmodern condition, White Teeth laughs at the contradictions and celebrates the achievements of postmodernism.

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