This chapter takes a look at Phillips, who was concerned with twentieth-century Britain and the ways belonging has been made difficult for non-white citizens. It discusses several of Phillips' works, and it traces the origins of the UK's unwelcoming attitude towards blacks entering the country, as well as the related anxieties surrounding national identity.

This chapter uses JPod, Coupland's surreal tenth novel, to re-read aspects of his work and, in particular, his recurrent interest in visions of the future. It uses this absurdist science-project or anti-art manifesto as a lens through which to review his creative work and its aesthetic and ideological implications. Whatever the future of Coupland's writing, it is unlikely to be found in a retreat into the past. The twenty-first century landscape of his recent fiction is frequently troubled; it is marked by random violence, loneliness and moral ambiguity. But, the future is dynamically open. A comforting vision of the past holds no temptation for this writer of the ambiguous, dangerous, beguiling present and possible future.

Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed With Kindness is a very different kind of domestic tragedy from Arden of Faversham or Two Lamentable Tragedies. It is not based on a historical narrative, and its only gestures towards geographical particularity are a few mentions of York and Yorkshire. There is no murder, and hence none of the accompanying tense frustrations of murder's prelude or aftermath and little of the temporal tightness with which long hours of anticipation are stretched in the other plays. Neither are the social tensions of competition between men quite the same in Heywood's play. The prologue sets up both the strictures of representation and the privations of low status, making suggestive comparison between the way material culture negotiates both types of difference. The insistence on the interrelationship of domestic spaces gives the play its strong sense of a physically coherent household, one that contains and gives significance to the events which take place within it.

R. K. Narayan's invented South Indian town of Malgudi, which is the setting for virtually all his fiction, has been seen by many of his readers as a site that represents quintessential Indianness. In various readings, Malgudi becomes a metonym for a traditional India, a locus that exists outside time and apart from the forces of modernity, a site which the complicitous ‘we’ used in both passages will immediately recognise as ‘authentic’. Tamil intertexts become more prominent in the second half of Narayan's career, but they occur in a dialectical relationship with his Western influences and novels such as The Guide. He may have chosen to write in English and for the most part turned his back on Tamil intertexts, but Tamil brahmin contexts are omnipresent in his work. Narayan's fiction is underpinned by four stages: the brahmacharya, grihastya, vanaprastha and sanyasa.

Graham Greene's shadow has hung over much of the critical response to R. K. Narayan's fiction, particularly reviews of his novels. Greene's view of Narayan as a mediator of essential Indianness for his Western sensibility recurs in the remarks of various later Western commentators, particularly prior to the advent of the post-Rushdie generation of fiction writers. Numerous other critics have considered aspects of Narayan's Hinduism, with the more perceptive commentators stressing the secular nature of his vision. For biographical information, Narayan's memoir My Days (1964) is the most important single source, while his encounters with American life are detailed in My Dateless Diary (1964). Narayan's treatment of gender has received attention from critics who have mainly been concerned with examining his representation of the role of women in twentieth-century South Indian life. Narayan's novels have also been read in numerous other ways. He has been seen as a commentator on Gandhianism, colonialism and cricket, amid many other things. Finally, though, Narayan has always been seen as the chronicler of Malgudi.

This chapter studies Dabydeen's move away from the historical archive in responding to the past in terms of slavery. It presents a deliberate vandalisation of—and disrespect towards—received history. It notes that Dabydeen's primary concern is with the ethics of representing slavery and that his works reveal his anxieties about audience and received readers for his texts. This chapter also examines A Harlot's Progress and The Counting House, where Dabydeen studies the role of Indian indentured labourers. A study of his narrative poem ‘Turner’ is included.

This chapter summarises some of the most significant trends in the critical approaches to the work of Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen and Fred D'Aguiar. It then emphasises important points made throughout the study. It notes that slavery has been overlooked in received historical narratives of Britain, and that the texts of these three writers that were studied in this book have tried to redress the silence surrounding slavery and show why it is important that this past is not forgotten.