Abstract
‘Black British’, as a category of ethnic, racial, or political identity, is leaky and imprecise, serving most usefully to describe how individuals and their work are positioned both in contemporary British society and in relation to their pasts. In the late 1970s and 1980s ‘black British’ was commonly used to designate ‘an “imagined community” comprising Caribbean, African, and South Asian experience in Britain’, whose presence reflected its historical entanglement and the continued movement of populations between colonial territories and the metropolitan centre.1 ‘Black’ also defined a culturally ‘united front against an increasingly explicit racialised white national community’, and was/is used as an aesthetic signifier of difference (Procter, p. 5). While more recently ‘black’ has been used to refer to a specific cultural heritage, whose identity is marked on the body as ‘blackness’,2 such a designation necessarily exists in the context of a view of culture that ‘accentuates its plastic, syncretic qualities and which does not see culture flowing into neat ethnic parcels but as a radically unfinished social process of self-definition and transformation’.3 It is a view of history as a process of ‘re-collection, a re-assemblage of the past’ (Procter, p. 2). As Buchi Emecheta’s character Francis implies in Second-Class Citizen (1974), ‘black’ was a learned and, for many migrants, a deficit identity: ‘West Indian, the Pakistanis … Indians [and] African students are usually grouped together … We are all blacks … and the only houses we can get are horrors like these.’4
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Notes
James Procter, ed., Writing Black Britain, 1948–98: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 5.
Henry Louis Gates Jnr, ‘A Reporter at Large: Black London’, Black British Culture and Society, ed. Kwesi Owusu (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 178.
Paul Gilroy, Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1993), p. 61.
Buchi Emecheta, Second-Class Citizen (Oxford: Heinemann, 1994), p. 35.
For a detailed discussion of water imagery in Lara, see John McLeod, Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 177–88.
Doreen Massey, ‘Places and Their Pasts’, History Workshop, 39 (1995), pp. 182–92.
Joan Riley, ‘Writing Reality in a Hostile Environment’, Kunapipi, 16:1 (1994), pp. 547–52.
Sandra Courtman, ‘Women Writers and the Windrush Generation: A Contextual Reading of Beryl Gilroy’s In Praise of Love and Children and Andrea Levy’s Small Island’, EnterText, 9 (2012), pp. 84–104;
Abigail Ward, ‘Postcolonial Interventions into the Archive of Slavery: Transforming Documents into Monuments in Beryl Gilroy’s Stedman and Joanna’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 45:2 (2010), pp. 245–58.
Martin Japtok, ‘Two Postcolonial Childhoods: Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack Monkey and Simi Bedford’s Yorbua Girl Dancing’, Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 6:1–2 (Fall 2001). Para. 16, http://english.chass.ncsu.ed/jouvert/v6il-2/con61. htm, accessed 20 November 2013.
Chris Weedon, ‘Identity and Belonging in Contemporary Black British Writing’, Black British Writing, ed. R. Victoria Arana and Lauri Ramey (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 81.
John McLeod, ‘Extra Dimensions, New Routines’, Wasafiri, 25:4 (2010), p. 45.
Michael Collins, ‘“My Preoccupations are in My DNA”: An Interview with Bernardine Evaristo’, Callaloo, 31:4 (2008), p. 1199.
Kadija Sesay, ‘Transformations Within the Black British Novel’, in Arana and Ramey, p. 102; Pilar Cuder-Domínguez, ‘Evaristo’s Lara and The Emperor’s Babe’, Imagined Londons, ed. Pamela K. Gilbert (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), p. 178;
Şebnem Toplu, Fiction Unbound: Bernardine Evaristo (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011), p. 45.
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 35.
Judie Newman, ‘The Black Atlantic as Dystopia: Bernardine Evaristo’s Blonde Roots’, Comparative Literature Studies, 49:2 (2012), p. 286.
Dave Gunning, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Marginalisation in Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe’, Write Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature, ed. Kadija Sesay (Hertford: Hansib Publications, 2005), p. 167, p. 170.
Bernardine Evaristo, The Emperor’s Babe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001), p. 99, p. 174, p. 175.
Jane Bryce, ‘“Hall and Hall Children”: Third Generation Women Writers and the Alrican Novel’, Research in African Literatures, 39:2 (2008), p. 53.
Diana Adesola Male, ‘Ghostly Girls in the “Eerie Bush”: Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl as Postcolonial Female Gothic Fiction’, Research in African Literatures, 43:3 (2012), p. 24;
Pilar Cuder-Domínguez, ‘Double Consciousness in the Work of Helen Oyeyemi and Diana Evans’, Women: A Cultural Review, 20:3 (2009), p. 279.
Helen Oyeyemi, The Icarus Girl (London: Bloomsbury 2006), p. 15.
Madelaine Hron, ‘Ora Na-azu nwa: The Figure of the Child in Third Generation Nigerian Novels’, Research in African Literatures, 39:2 (2008), p. 37.
Diana Evans, 26a (London: Vintage, 2006), p. 97.
Nigel Thrift, ‘Space’, Theory, Culture and Society, 23:2–3 (2006), p. 143.
Diana Evans, The Wonder (London: Vintage, 2010), p. 12.
Philp Tew, Zadie Smith (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 118, p. 125.
Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), pp. 34–5.
Laura Moss, ‘The Politics of Everyday Hybridity’, Wasafiri, 38:3 (2003), pp. 11–17.
See, for example, Alice Ridout, Contemporary Writers Look Back: From Irony to Nostalgia (London: Continuum, 2010), pp. 103–22;
Ann Marie Adams, Alice Ridout, Contemporary Writers Look Back: From Irony to Nostalgia (London: Continuum, 2010), pp. 103–22;
Ann Marie Adams, ‘A Passage to Forster: Zadie Smith’s Attempt to “Only Connect” to Howards End’, Critique, 52:4 (2011), pp. 277–399.
Lourdes Lopez-Ropero also notes intertextual links to campus novels of writers such as David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury in ‘Homage and Revision: Zadie Smith’s Use of E.M. Forster in On Beauty’, Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 32:2 (2010), pp. 7–20.
See also Dorothy J. Hale, ‘On Beauty as Beautiful? The Problem of Novelistic Aesthetics By Way of Zadie Smith’, Contemporary Literature, 53:4 (2012), p. 815.
Nicole King, ‘Creolisation and On Beauty: Form, Character and the Goddess Erzulie’, Women: A Cultural Review, 20:3 (2009), p. 267.
Susan Alice Fischer, ‘A Glance from God’: Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and Zora Neale Hurston’, Changing English, 14:3 (2007), pp. 285–97.
For a political reading of On Beauty, see Regine Jackson, ‘Imagining Boston: Haitian Immigrants and Place in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty’, Journal of American Studies, 46:4 (2012), pp. 855–73, and
Kanika Batra, ‘Kipps, Belsey and Jegede: Cosmopolitanism, Transnationalism, and Black Studies in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty’, Callaloo, 33:4 (2010), pp. 1079–92.
See Maria Helena Lima, ‘Pivoting the Centre’, in Sesay, p. 71; Ole Birk Laursen, ‘“Telling Her a Story”: Remembering Trauma in Andrea Levy’s Writing’, EnterText, 9 (2012), pp. 53–68;
Claudia Marquis, ‘Crossing Over: Postmemory and the Postcolonial Imaginary in Andrea Levy’s Small Island and Fruit of the Lemon’, EnterFext, 9 (2012), pp. 31–52.
Blake Morrison, ‘Andrea Levy Interviewed by Blake Morrison’, Women: A Cultural Review, 20:3 (2009), p. 331.
Cynthia James, ‘“You’ll Soon Get Used to Our Language”: Language, Parody and West Indian Identity in Andrea Levy’s Small Island’, Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, 5:1 (2007), 29 paras, http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/anthurium/vol5/issl/3, accessed 20 November 2013.
Zoe Norridge, ‘Sex as Synecdoche: Intimate Languages of Violence in Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love’, Research in African Literatures, 43:2 (2012), p. 35.
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Scafe, S. (2015). Unsettling the Centre: Black British Fiction. In: Eagleton, M., Parker, E. (eds) The History of British Women’s Writing, 1970-Present. The History of British Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-29481-4_15
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