Since the mid-1990s, the black experience in Britain has begun to be (re)negotiated intensely, with a strong focus on history. Narrative Projections of a Black British History considers narratives that construct, or engage with, aspects of a black British history. Part I poses the question of what sort of narratives have emerged from, and in turn determine, key events (such as the iconic 'Windrush' moment) and developments and provides basic insights into theoretical frameworks. It also offers a large number of comparative readings, considering both 'factual' and 'fictional' forms of representation such as history books, documentary films, life writing, novels, and drama, and identifies main strands, 'official' narratives and countercurrents. Part II embarks on close readings and analyses of a selection of narratives that can be classed as reactions to the 'established' historical culture. Overall, the book draws attention to collective currents and individual positions, affirmative and critical approaches: Together, they form a representative image of a specific moment in the ongoing debate about a black British history.

This book explores the history of women’s engagement with writing experimentally. Women writers have long used different narratives and modes of writing as a way of critiquing worlds and stories that they find themselves at odds with, but at the same time, as a way to participate in such spaces. Experimentation—of style, mode, voice, genre and language—has enabled women writers to be simultaneously creative and critical, engaged in and yet apart from stories and cultures that have so often seen them as ‘other’. This collection shows that women writers in English over the past 400 years have challenged those ideas not only through explicit polemic and alternative representations but through disrupting the very modes of representation and story itself.

This Companion offers a comprehensive account of the influence of contemporary British Black and Asian writing in British culture. While there are a number of anthologies covering Black and Asian literature, there is no volume that comparatively addresses fiction, poetry, plays and performance, and provides critical accounts of the qualities and impact within one book. It charts the distinctive Black and Asian voices within the body of British writing and examines the creative and cultural impact that African, Caribbean and South Asian writers have had on British literature. It analyzes literary works from a broad range of genres, while also covering performance writing and non-fiction. It offers pertinent historical context throughout, and new critical perspectives on such key themes as multiculturalism and evolving cultural identities in contemporary British literature. This Companion explores race, politics, gender, sexuality, identity, amongst other key literary themes in Black and Asian British literature. It will serve as a key resource for scholars, graduates, teachers and students alike.

The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing provides a comprehensive historical overview of the diverse literary traditions impacting on this field's evolution, from the eighteenth century to the present. Drawing on the expertise of over forty international experts, this book gathers innovative scholarship to look forward to new readings and perspectives, while also focusing on undervalued writers, texts, and research areas. Creating new pathways to engage with the naming of a field that has often been contested, readings of literary texts are interwoven throughout with key political, social, and material contexts. In making visible the diverse influences constituting past and contemporary British literary culture, this Cambridge History makes a unique contribution to British, Commonwealth, postcolonial, transnational, diasporic, and global literary studies, serving both as one of the first major reference works to cover four centuries of black and Asian British literary history and as a compass for future scholarship.

Black British Drama: A Transnational Story looks afresh at the ways black theatre in Britain is connected to and informed by the spaces of Africa, the Caribbean and the USA. Michael Pearce offers an exciting new approach to reading modern and contemporary black British drama, examining plays by a range of writers including Michael Abbensetts, Mustapha Matura, Caryl Phillips, Winsome Pinnock, Kwame Kwei-Armah, debbie tucker green, Roy Williams and Bola Agbaje. Chapters combine historical documentation and discussion with close analysis to provide an in-depth, absorbing account of post-war black British drama situated within global and transnational circuits. A significant contribution to black British and black diaspora theatre studies, Black British Drama is a must-read for scholars and students in this evolving field.

Precarious Passages unites literature written by members of the far-flung Black Anglophone diaspora. Rather than categorizing novels as simply "African American," "Black Canadian," "Black British," or "postcolonial African Caribbean," this book takes an integrative approach: it argues that fiction creates and sustains a sense of a wider African diasporic community in the Western world. Tuire Valkeakari analyzes the writing of Toni Morrison, Caryl Phillips, Lawrence Hill, and other contemporary novelists of African descent. She shows how their novels connect with each other and with defining moments in the transatlantic experience, most notably the Middle Passage and enslavement. The lives of their characters are marked by migration and displacement. Their protagonists yearn to experience fulfilling human connection in a place they can call home. Portraying strategies of survival, adaptation, and resistance across the limitless varieties of life experiences in the diaspora, these novelists continually reimagine what it means to share a Black diasporic identity.

Perspectives on the ways in which welfarist ideology has underpinned the teaching, reading and production of literature from the 1930s to the present. The welfare state in Britain established a new level of access to literature as a public good alongside other national resources that were grounded in a principle of democratic egalitarianism: the National Health Service, secondary education, promises of full employment and new housing structures. This volume charts the impact of the founding of the welfare state on the teaching, reading and production of literature, and the legacy of this social democratic vision of literature, from the 1930s to the present day; it is especially concerned with the representational possibilities, the social arrangements and political claims that welfare makes possible. Individual contributions consider the ways in which the history of literature is related to the history of welfare; and how it shaped the literary culture that emerged during these years; and how literature has communicated the value and character of the welfare state, moving, like the literature they examine, between a disenchantment with the institutions of welfare and an urgent need to articulate welfare's vision of social repair. Amongst the particular authors discussed are Raymond Williams, T.S. Eliot and Caryl Phillips, as well as an evaluation of the publisher Virago's contribution to the women's movement.