Scottish Extractions. ‘Race’ and Racism in Devolutionary Fiction

Abstract

Black Scottish and Scots Asian representations have been prominent in twenty‐first‐century Scottish literature. This essay contends that such fiction (covering the period 1995–2004) is most productively read in correlation with a wider contemporary debate on race, ethnicity and nationalism in a devolved Scotland and it provides such a reading, focusing among others on Jackie Kay’s Trumpet (1998), Suhayl Saadi’s Psychoraag (2004), Luke Sutherland’s Venus as a Boy (2004) and Jelly Roll (1997), and James Robertson’s Joseph Knight (2003). I argue that a preoccupation with ‘race’ and racial issues in this fiction cannot but be read as contiguous with an ongoing devolutionary momentum in Scottish culture and politics that has shifted the parameters of Britain and Britishness since the delivery of political devolution in 1997. In such a momentous context of political transformation, literature has sought to challenge undetected (or underwritten) levels of Scottish racial discrimination that weigh heavily in discussions surrounding Scotland’s autonomous position – culturally and politically – in a ‘post‐British’ world and it provides an opportunity to interrogate an emergent controversy concerning the political economy of ‘orthodox’ Scottish identity.Underpinning my analysis are a number of issues at the heart of debates over ‘devolutionary’ identities. I question whether the novels discussed register a collapse of Britishness in a period when the coherence of ‘British’ fiction becomes increasingly unstable. The stability of ‘black British’ as a unitary cultural term after devolution is also questioned in relation to the emergence of ‘black Scottish’ literature. Relative to this is the issue of how the protagonists of these novels situate themselves in relation to debates surrounding Scotland’s settled ethnic heritage. I argue that contemporary Scottish novels instigate a focus on relatively suppressed Scottish patterns of race and racism and that they challenge the manner in which Scottish identity is predominantly figured in terms of ethnicity. In conclusion, my overview suggests that these novels are far from being myopic in their Scottish focus and that the dislocated Scottish characters gesture to a greater international understanding of the manner in which globalised conditions are permanently entangled with localised forms of exclusion and extraction. A devolved literature is also an internationally engaged one. Its bilateral focus, I suggest, configures the alignment of Scottish racial issues with devolutionary matters in the UK and global realignments in class and cultural geographies.