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Write Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature. Edited by Kadija Sesay. Foreword by Lola Young. Hansib Publications [POB 226, Hertford SG14 3WY, UK]. 2005. 280 pages. price UK 14.99 pb. ISBN 1-870518-06-3
Who, what, why, and when is Black British Literature? Prabhu Guptara's ground breaking Black British Literature: An Annotated Bibliography (1986) included black, Indian, Sri Lankan, Pakistani, Chinese, just about every non-European, non-white, author who lived or had lived in England including writers of popular fiction. Soon, however, the 1980s political alliance between black and 'Asian' (a term that few Indians or Pakistanis would normally use) fragmented as can be seen from the title of C. L. Innes's survey of A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain 1700-2000 (2000), a division also found in Sukhdev Sandhu's London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City (2003). Each of the three books showed that England had a history of non-whites, who contributed to its culture long before the wave of immigration that followed the Second World War. In attempting to map a previously neglected past they were saying that it is a myth to claim Great Britain has always been white until recently- black people have historically been part of England.
Although Mark Stein's Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation (2004) discusses authors from Asian, Caribbean and African backgrounds, his book marks a shift from tracing a continuity from the earlier immigrant writers to what he terms a 'new beginning'. While discussing Sam Selvon as a someone who began the change, Stein focuses on recent generations of writers born in or mostly raised in England - Hanif Kureishi, Caryl Phillips, and David Dabydeen, as well as Meera Syal, Diran Adebayo, Andrea Levy, and Bernardine Evaristo. His is still a Black English literature inclusive of those of Asian and part-Asian origins, as well as those born in the...