Born in St. Kitts and brought up in the UK, bestselling author Caryl Phillips has written about and explored the experience of migration for more than thirty years through his spellbinding and award-winning novels, plays, and essays. Now, in a magnificent and beautifully written new book, Phillips reflects on the shifting notions of race, culture, and belonging before and after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Color Me English opens with an inspired story from his boyhood, a poignant account of a shared sense of isolation he felt with the first Muslim boy who joined his school. Phillips then turns to his years living and teaching in the United States, including a moving account of the day the twin towers fell. We follow him across Europe and through Africa while he grapples with making sense of colonial histories and contemporary migrations—engaging with legendary African, African American, and international writers from James Baldwin and Richard Wright to Chinua Achebe and Ha Jin who have aspired to see themselves and their own societies more clearly. A truly transnational reflection on race and culture in a post-9/11 world, Color Me English is a stunning collection of writing that is at once timeless and urgent.

Taking as its starting point a moving recollection of growing up in Leeds during the 1970s, Colour Me English broadens into a reflective, entertaining and challenging collection of essays and other non-fiction writing which ranges from the literary to the cultural and autobiographical. Caryl Phillips describes the experience of living and working in America, and travels in Sierra Leone and beyond. He considers the lives and works of many figures including Chinua Achebe, James Baldwin, Billie Holiday and Luther Vandross, and how their experiences are refracted through the prisms of writing, music and cinema.

This book takes a post-racial approach to the representation of race in contemporary British fiction, re-imagining studies of race and British literature away from concerns with specific racial groups towards a more sophisticated analysis of the contribution of a broad, post-racial British writing. Examining the work of writers from a wide range of diverse racial backgrounds, the book illustrates how contemporary British fiction, rather than merely reflecting social norms, is making a radical contribution towards the possible future of a positively multi-ethnic and post-racial Britain. This is developed by a strategic use of the realist form, which becomes a utopian device as it provides readers with a reality beyond current circumstances, yet one which is rooted within an identifiable world. Speaking to the specific contexts of British cultural politics, and directly connecting with contemporary debates surrounding race and identity in Britain, the author engages with a wide range of both mainstream and neglected authors, including Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Julian Barnes, John Lanchester, Alan Hollinghurst, Martin Amis, Jon McGregor, Andrea Levy, Bernardine Evaristo, Hanif Kureishi, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hari Kunzru, Nadeem Aslam, Meera Syal, Jackie Kay, Maggie Gee, and Neil Gaiman. This cutting-edge volume explores how contemporary fiction is at the centre of re-thinking how we engage with the question of race in twenty-first-century Britain.

Empires as political entities may be a thing of the past, but as a concept, empire is alive and kicking. From heritage tourism and costume dramas to theories of the imperial idea(l): empire sells. Post-Empire Imaginaries? Anglophone Literature, History, and the Demise of Empires presents innovative scholarship on the lives and legacies of empires in diverse media such as literature, film, advertising, and the visual arts. Though rooted in real space and history, the post-empire and its twin, the post-imperial, emerge as ungraspable ideational constructs. The volume convincingly establishes empire as welcoming resistance and affirmation, introducing post-empire imaginaries as figurations that connect the archives and repertoires of colonial nostalgia, postcolonial critique, post-imperial dreaming.

The 20th century has witnessed crucial changes in our perceptions of Europe. Two World Wars and many regional conflicts, the end of empires and of the Eastern Bloc, the creation and expansion of the European Union, and the continuous reshaping of Europe’s population through emigration, immigration, and globalization have led to a proliferation of images of Europe within the continent and beyond. While Eurocentrism governs current public debates in Europe, this book takes a special interest in literary and cinematographic imaginings of Europe that are produced from more distant, decentred, or peripheral vantage points and across differences of political power, ideological or ethnic affinity, cultural currency, linguistic practice, and geographical location. The contributions to this book demonstrate how these particular imaginings of Europe, often without first-hand experience of the continent, do not simply hold up a mirror to Europe, but dare to conceive of new perspectives and constellations for Europe that call for a shifting of critical positions. In so doing, the artistic visions from afar confirm the significance of cultural imagination in (re)conceptualizing the past, present, and future of Europe. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.