Abstract
Abstract Chapter 3 turns to Windrush literary production as a testing-ground where wartime visions of reconstruction met postwar social realities, manifesting in the unevenly felt experiences of making Britain home for colonial subjects turned citizen. In doing so, it addresses another challenge to Britain’s plans for social welfare: midcentury decolonization movements and mass immigration to the UK. It begins by bringing the study of the postwar in relation to the postcolonial, arguing that the rise of Britain’s welfare state cannot be read without reference to its history as a global superpower. It then tracks the dream of communal domesticity that saturates the work of Samuel Selvon, including Sunday basement meetings in The Lonely Londoners (1956) and collective home ownership in The Housing Lark (1965). It ends by considering how the Windrush generation continues to inform contemporary literary production in works such as Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004) and Zadie Smith’s NW (2012).
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