Lessons from London: E. R. Braithwaite and Black Writing in 1950s Britain

Abstract

The 1950s and 1960s constitute one of the most significant periods for black writing in Britain. In the wake of war and Windrush, major works appeared by Sam Selvon, George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul, Andrew Salkey, Kamau Brathwaite, John La Rose, and others, written both in Britain and about Britain by its latest citizens newly arrived from countries with a history of colonialism.1 The advent of this formidable, remarkable moment of literary creativity begs comparison with the emergence of literary modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century — often a product too, of course, of migrants, expatriates, and exiles. But in accounting for the literary fortunes of the mid-century, this momentous gathering of literary voices after the war has been ignored entirely or annexed into the specialist subcategory of ‘black British writing’, kept safely away from the predominant metanarrative of British literature. Ignoring black writers of Britain — their presence, their impact, their influence — is an habitual failing of so many accounts of literature from the mid-century to the present. D. J. Taylor has nothing to say about black writers from the 1950s and 1960s in his account of the novel and England since 1945, After the War (1993). While Naipaul, David Dabydeen, and Salman Rushdie eventually appear in his study, like many others Taylor recognizes a distinctly migrant and international element to postwar British writing only towards the end of the century, after 1980. It is a familiar pattern: Malcolm Bradbury’s contemporaneous but much more detailed study, The Modern British Novel (1993), makes ‘a new spirit of ethnic and stylistic multiculturalism’ in British writing a distinctly post-1979, Rushdie-prompted phenomenon.2 Everything before it seems of little consequence.