Africa in Europe: narrating black British history in contemporary fiction

Abstract

This article analyses three examples of contemporary black British fiction that attempt to inscribe into the narrative of Britain the experience of the African diaspora: not only the life of immigrants from the former colonies after World War II, but also the less visible earlier settlement of Africans in the United Kingdom. This is a presence that official history has usually erased or underplayed in the construction of British identity, and these stories complicate the traditional concept of an ethnically homogeneous British past. Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004) serves as a necessary reminder that before Caribbean workers came to rebuild the UK in the late 1940s, they had participated in the war effort; David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress (2000) recreates the life of enslaved and free Africans in Britain in the late eighteenth century; Bernardine Evaristo’s comic novel-in-verse The Emperor’s Babe (2001) imagines the presence of an African family in Roman Britannia.