Post-World War II mass migration to Great Britain altered its demographic composition more markedly than in any other period in its history, resulting in a modern multicultural nation state shaped by the ethnic diversity of its citizenry. Populations from African, Caribbean and South Asian locations arriving in Britain post-war brought diasporic sensibilities and literary heritages that have profoundly transformed British national culture, leading to a more complex and inclusive sense of its past. The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature (1945–2010) examines the creative impact of this rich infusion upon English literature against the backdrop of the seismic social and economic changes triggered by colonialism and migration, multiculturalism and contemporary globalisation.

Since 1945 Britain has gradually declined from governing a vast empire to being a middle-scale world power that must align itself to the European Union or the United States in order to exert influence in global affairs. Despite this, the English language and Anglophone literature maintain a formidable impact internationally. In a social context where Britain's political, educational, commercial and arts institutions today continue to display little ethnic and racial diversity, this Companion is timely, as it reasserts the influential presences of contemporary British Black and Asian literature as intrinsic to conceptions of British cultural heritage, while recognising the distinctiveness of this literature within the corpus of British writing and its global appeal.

The volume's starting-point of 1945 follows the familiar splitting of twentieth-century literary history into pre- and post-World War II, which generally equates with the transition from modernism to postmodernism and the heterogeneity of post-colonial theory. Intersecting with these literary frameworks are certain phenomenological structures of race, sex-gender, class and nation that were generated in previous eras, but that continue to act consequentially as a spectre within current writers’ creativities – whether through cultural legacies and networks, critical traditions, or the institutions that filter cultural access and opportunity.

‘British Black and Asian’ literature testifies to the magnitude of post-war migration's rejuvenation and renovation of British culture. Post-war immigrants had a major impact on British society – and British society had a major impact on them. Britain's imperial rule had never been monolithic, but tailored to specific nations and spaces throughout its empire.