Writing Black Britain 1948 1998

"Brings together a diverse range of black British literatures, essays and documents from across the post-war period ... includes South Asian, African and Caribbean cultural production by both leading and lesser-known artists, critics and commentators ... [accommodates] popular and 'high' cultural materials from across the disciplines of literature, film, photography, history, sociology, politics, Marxism, feminism, cultural and communications studies"--Publisher

The Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture is the first comprehensive reference book to provide multidisciplinary coverage of the field of black cultural production in Britain. The publication is of particular value because despite attracting growing academic interest in recent years, this field is still often subject to critical and institutional neglect. For the purpose of the Companion, the term 'black' is used to signify African, Caribbean and South Asian ethnicities, while at the same time addressing the debates concerning notions of black Britishness and cultural identity. This single volume Companion covers seven intersecting areas of black British cultural production since 1970: writing, music, visual and plastic arts, performance works, film and cinema, fashion and design, and intellectual life. With entries on distinguished practitioners, key intellectuals, seminal organizations and concepts, as well as popular cultural forms and local activities, the Companion is packed with information and suggestions for further reading, as well as offering a wide lens on the events and issues that have shaped the cultural interactions and productions of black Britain over the last thirty years. With a range of specialist advisors and contributors, this work promises to be an invaluable sourcebook for students, researchers and academics interested in exploring the diverse, complex and exciting field of black cultural forms in postcolonial Britain.

Extending geographically from London to Glasgow James Procter's study explores black literary and cultural production across the post World War Two period. The author considers how places like dwellings, bedsits and public spaces, contribute to the travelling theories of diaspora discourse.

Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature offers the first comprehensive exploration of the cultural impact of the politics of race and antiracism in recent novels by black British and British Asian writers. It examines works by Zadie Smith, Caryl Phillips, Nadeem Aslam, Ferdinand Dennis, and others, arguing that an understanding of how race and ethnicity function in contemporary Britain can only be gained through attention to antiracism and the ways it conditions racial categories, identities, and models of behavior. Looking at topics such as the role of Africa, the reception of Islam, and the meaning of multiculturalism, Dave Gunning offers a detailed engagement with the nuances of antiracism and their effects on British literature and culture.

In this fascinating book, Mark Stein examines black British literature, centering on a body of work created by British-based writers with African, South Asian, or Caribbean cultural backgrounds. Linking black British literature to the bildungsroman genre, this study examines the transformative potential inscribed in and induced by a heterogeneous body of texts. Capitalizing on their plural cultural attachments, these texts portray and purvey the transformation of post-imperial Britain. Stein locates his wide-ranging analysis in both a historical and a literary context. He argues that a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach is essential to understanding post-colonial culture and society. The book relates black British literature to ongoing debates about cultural diversity, and thereby offers a way of reading a highly popular but as yet relatively uncharted field of cultural production. With the collapse of its empire, with large-scale immigration from former colonies, and with ever-increasing cultural diversity, Britain underwent a fundamental makeover in the second half of the twentieth century. This volume cogently argues that black British literature is not only a commentator on and a reflector of this makeover, but that it is simultaneously an agent that is integral to the processes of cultural and social change. Conceptualizing the novel of transformation, this comprehensive study of British black literature provides a compelling analytic framework for charting these processes.

This much-needed collection examines the formation of a black British canon including writers, dramatists, film-makers and artists. Contributors including John McLeod, Michael McMillan, Mike Phillips and Alison Donnell discuss the textual, political and cultural history of black British and the term 'black British' itself.

The second volume of Resistance and the City emphasises the significance of race, class, and gender for negotiations over hegemony in urban communities.

This book offers a new approach to reading the cultural memory of Africa in African American fiction from the post-Civil Rights era and in Black British fiction emerging in the wake of Thatcherism. The critical period between the decline of the Civil Rights Movement and the dawn of the twenty-first century saw a deep contrast in the distinctive narrative approaches displayed by diverse African diaspora literatures in negotiating the crisis of representing the past. Through a series of close readings of literary fiction, this work examines how the cultural memory of Africa is employed in diverse and specific negotiations of narrative time, in order to engage and shape contemporary identity and citizenship. By addressing the practice of “remembering” Africa, the book argues for the signal importance of the African diaspora’s literary interventions, and locates new paradigms for cultural identity in contemporary times.