Textual Transformations in Contemporary Black Writing in Britain

Jawhar Ahmed Dhouib

doi:10.7575/aiac.alls.v.5n.2p.120

Abstract

While the first wave of Caribbean immigrant writers brilliantly explored race-related issues, black Britons like Andrea Levy, Zadie Smith and Caryl Phillips, among others, have sought to depart from earlier fiction, motivated in their project by the changing white face of Britain. In this article, I would like to argue that cultural change in Britain has deeply influenced literary production and has, consequently, laid the ground for a series of textual transformations. To capture instances of creative excess in contemporary black writing in Britain, I will bring under examination Caryl Phillips’s (2009) novel In the Falling Snow . My intention is to show to what extent Phillips’s work surpasses the ‘noose of race’ and already-familiar representations of multicultural Britain to celebrate a ‘post-racial’ society.

Highlights

Novels by pioneer West Indian writers in Britain, chief among whom are V.S
While the first wave of Caribbean immigrant writers brilliantly explored the desire for return that haunted the Windrushers, contemporary black fiction in Britain, by contrast, dispenses with the idea of return, and more significantly, with establishing comparisons between the ‘here’ of black Britons and the ‘there’ of their progenitors
To capture instances of creative excess in contemporary black writing in Britain, I will bring under scrutiny Caribbean-born writer Caryl Phillips’s novel In the Falling Snow, first published in 2009.iii Phillips’s novel is set at the cross-currents between the familiar migration novels written by pioneer West Indian writers and the growing body of twenty-first century cosmopolitan fiction produced by black Britons

Summary

Introduction

Novels by pioneer West Indian writers in Britain, chief among whom are V.S. Naipaul, Samuel Selvon, George Lamming and Wilson Harris, to name but a few, have offered a lively palette of stories, bittersweet anecdotes, vivid experiences and profound meditations on the journey from the Caribbean to the metropolis. Examining Phillips’s oeuvre offers, an entry into the engagement of contemporary black writers in Britain in developing a culture-predicated discourse that gives prominence to mixed-race identities and that squares with the demographic profile of new millennium Britain. To this extent, this paper argues that the representation of polycultural London in Phillips’s novel exceeds hyphenated forms of identity to renegotiate the metropolis as a ‘home space.’

Changing Currents: Superseding the Multiculturalism Model

Hybrid Identities and the Fracturing Generational Chasm

Alternative Visions of the Metropolis

Polyculturalism and Beyond

Findings

Notes on contributor