Search Results

In this final chapter, late modernism’s outward turn captures the changes in political belonging wrought by the twin phenomena of decolonization and mass migration from the Caribbean to British shores.

An analysis of The Emigrants, The Final Passage, and Small Island, chapter 4 brings together this book’s arguments by exploring the relationship among diasporic, imperial, and national identity formations in George Lamming’s, Caryl Phillips’s, and Andrea Levy’s novels about West Indian immigrants (who are both African Caribbean diasporans and subjects of the British empire) settling in Britain after World War II. Lamming and Phillips—members, respectively, of the first and second generations of post-Windrush writers—convey a Middle Passage sensibility more powerfully than does Levy, who, in the generational classification of post-Windrush novelists, belongs to the third generation. Like The Emigrants and Final Passage, Small Island, too, underscores the antiblack racism experienced by black Caribbean migrants to Britain. Yet exilic melancholy, though a presence, does not dominate Small Island in the way it controls Lamming’s and Phillips’s writing. In Levy’s treatment, the story of the postwar black Caribbean diaspora in Britain grows into a narrative of active diaspora-making. Finally, the chapter also examines how each of these three authors portrays the gendered aspects of the postwar Caribbean migration to Britain.

This chapter discusses the emigration of West Indians after the Second World War. It describes the arrival of black West Indians, generalised as Jamaicans, aboard the Empire Windrush to Britain in 1948. The chapter explores the significance of the migrant journeys of the West Indians, the beginning of black presence in Britain and the contributions of the migrants to the nation's chronological evolution.

When Lord Kitchener proclaimed, “London is the place for me” as he exited the SS Empire Windrush, he did so at a critical juncture in the global and diasporic history of race politics in Britain and the African Diaspora. This introduction reimagines the landing of the Windrush as a historical guidepost linking the political experiences of people of African descent in the Empire and those within the confines of the imperial metropolis. The introduction outlines elements of the broader historical context shaping histories of Afro-Caribbean migration to Britain and the attendant questions about race, citizenship, and Black Britishness that these movements prompted during the postwar era. This book argues that Black Britons actively shaped debates about race and citizenship in Britain. Moreover, it situates postwar race politics in Britain within a larger transnational historiography about Black political activity and struggles for citizenship within the African Diaspora in the twentieth century.

The end of the war saw many departures from Britain—troops were demobbed and refugees returned. But in the aftermath of war, the population in Britain remained more diverse than it had been before 1939. Government schemes generated many post-war arrivals through the recruitment of workers, mainly from Europe. Many of those who stayed on or returned remember a change of climate in the aftermath of war—to a more hostile one, their wartime contributions forgotten. Such forgetting is apparent also in cultural memories disseminated in British cinema and other media. The celebration of an ‘allies’ war’ was for the duration of the war only—the images and sounds of allies, which had been so prominent in wartime Britain, faded rapidly when the war was over. In public memories, many groups who contributed to the Allied war effort were forgotten, not only in Britain, but also in their own countries.

The introduction opens by situating the book in contemporary debates on religion, immigration, and integration in Western Europe. The “Muslim question” that underlies many of these debates can be deeply troubling, yet it is also unanswerable. The introduction proposes moving beyond the Muslim question to the more tangible and forward-looking “civic question”: what kinds of citizens are immigrants and their descendants becoming? With this question in place as core to the book, the introduction then proceeds to explain the research that was conducted with second-generation young people in London. The two groups studied—young Jamaicans in Brixton and young Bengalis in the East End—are described in turn. Brief histories are provided of post-Windrush immigration, settlement, and politics in Brixton and the East End. The introduction succinctly explains the research methods of the study. It ends with a brief outline of the content of each chapter in the book.