New Ethnicities

Abstract

Now I think that being is in a state of perpetual change. And what I call creolisation is very sign of that change. In creolisation, you can change, you can be with Other, you can change with Other while being yourself, you are not one, you are multiple . . .- Edouard GlissantIN THE AFTERMATH OF THE LONDON RIOTS of August 2011, British historian David Starkey provoked a storm of public outrage when, in a discussion on BBC Television on cause of riots, he stated that the problem is that whites have become black . . . What has happened is that a substantial section of have become black.1 Starkey's comment was condemned by black and white pundits alike, primarily because his attempt to explain participation of white youths - chavs - in rioting and looting invoked racist stereotypes of unruly/riotous black youth.2 Furthermore, Starkey's reference to chavs, a white, urban working-class subculture whose male members adopt so-called gangster fashions and street slang, also invokes menacing, stereotypical spectre of black male criminality, thought to influence style and behaviours of chavs.Louise Bennett's poem Colonization in Reverse, written in 1950s, commented satirically and prophetically on influential presence of West Indians who emigrated to Britain in years following end of World War II.3 Her observations in this poem anticipated Starkey's remarks by several decades. This essay, focusing on literary representations of West Indians in London, examines implications of surprising convergence of views expressed by Starkey and by Bennett, specifically their allusions to what Starkey described as blackening of white Britons, and what Bennett described as colonization in reverse.Under consideration is high period of twentieth-century West Indian immigration, bracketed in West Indian literature of immigration by Samuel Selvon's 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners4 and Zadie Smith's 2001 novel White Teeth.5 In intervening forty-five years, a canon of West Indian writing, as well as other creative expressions, emerged, with representations of immigration experiences that included arrival, embattled process of settlement and struggle for social acceptance, and particular challenges of second generation.Drawing on representations of relations between West Indian immigrants and British natives in literature published in latter half of twentieth century, this essay focuses on two broad phases of West Indian immigration, settlement, and social interaction with Britons in London, and comments on developments that would support Starkey's and Bennett's claims. The first period spans 1948, year passenger ship HMT Empire Windrush arrived at Southampton, to 1981, year of Brixton and Tottenham uprisings, which marked a turning point in black politics in London and in country as a whole. In phase that followed, 1981-2001, black identities forged in preceding decades by processes of settlement, adaptation and inter-racial relationships - identities categorised by Stuart Hall as new ethnicities - emerged, to be embraced and consolidated by some second-, thirdand even first-generation West Indians, or rejected by others who cleaved to a remembered, rather than lived West Indianness.6To elucidate observations derived from creative literature, this essay also draws on contemporaneous criticism produced by British scholars in disciplines of cultural studies and postcolonial studies, as well as migration studies, and on theories of creolisation from disciplines of sociology and history.The postwar periodThe first wave of West Indian migrants comprised predominantly young men escaping economic hardship at home by responding to promise of jobs in postwar reconstruction of London. But by late 1950s, women were arriving in increasingly greater numbers to take jobs in new National Health Service hospitals and on London transport. …