Abstract
In this afterword I want to give thought to what might be at stake in discussing the idea of a black British canon in the cultural and political climate of Britain at the start of the twenty-first century. As noted in the Introduction, this essay does not, therefore, set out a genealogical account of canon formation, but concludes the volume with possible interventions into, and questions derived from, the key critical debates relevant to our understanding of a black British canon today.
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Notes
F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (1948. rpt: Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962).
T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methues, 1922).
Aijaz Ahmad, ‘Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”’, Social Text, 17 (1987), pp. 3–25; p. 25.
Fredric Jameson, ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, Social Text, 15 (1986), pp. 65–88.
William Walsh, Commonwealth Literature (London: Macmillan, 1980).
John Press (ed.), The Teaching of English Literature Overseas (London: Methuen, 1963).
See also, Gerald Moore’s pioneering work on African writing, Seven African Writers (London: Oxford University Press, 1962)
edited with Ulli Beier, Modern Poetry From Africa (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963)
and African Literature and the Universities (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1965)
At the University of Kent, Louis James produced one of the first book studies on the Caribbean, The Islands In Between (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968)
See Alison Donnell, Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature (London: Routledge, 2004), for a discussion of how Caribbean literature is discoursed upon, how canons are created, and what ideological and historical pressures shape such discussions.
Courttia Newland and Kadija Sesay (eds), IC3: The Penguin Anthology of New Black Writing in Britain (Penguin: London, 2000), pp. xii–xiv; p. xiii.
Patsy Antoine and Courttia Newland (eds), Afrobeat (London: Pulp Books, 1999)
Karen McCarthy (ed.), Bittersweet: contemporary black women’s poetry (London: Women’s Press, 1998)
Lemn Sissay (ed.), The Fire People: a collection of contemporary black British poets (Edinburgh: Payback Press, 1998)
Ferdinand Dennis and Naseem Khan (eds), Voices of the Crossing: the impact of Britain on writers from Asia, the Caribbean and Africa (London: Serpents Tail, 2000)
For anthologies see: Onyekachi Wambu (ed.), Empire Windrush (London: Phoenix, 1999)
James Procter (ed.), Writing black Britain 1948–1998 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000)
For example: Paul Gilroy, ‘The peculiarities of the black English’, in Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1993)
Stuart Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’, in Black Film/British Cinema, ICA Document 7 (London, Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1988), pp. 27–31
and ‘Reinventing Britain: A Forum’, Wasafiri, 29 (1999), pp. 37–44
Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: new positions in black cultural studies (London: Routledge, 1994)
Hall, op. cit. (1999), P. 37.
Alison Donnell, ‘Nation and Contestation: Black British Writing’, Wasafiri, 36 (2002), pp. 11–17; p. 16.
Gilroy, op. cit. (1993), p. 62.
Donnell, op. cit., p. 16.
Paul Gilroy, After Empire: melancholia and convivial culture? (Oxford: Routledge, 2004), p. 3 and xi.
Gilroy, op. cit. (2004), p. 134.
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Donnell, A. (2006). Afterword: In Praise of a Black British Canon and the Possibilities of Representing the Nation ‘Otherwise’. In: Low, G., Wynne-Davies, M. (eds) A Black British Canon?. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230625693_11
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