The nineteenth century gave us the idea of “culture” as the broadest framework in which the forms of life of a society, whether a tribe or a national state, can be located. From cooking to clothing, from poetry to dance, to marriage, to religion, these and every other aspect of a society's customs, practices, and beliefs are part of something we have come to call its “culture.” This is an idea that began in embryo in Giambattista Vico's Nuova Scienza (1725) and came fully into the light of day in Germany and France decades later in the work of Johann Gottfried Herder, Georg Hegel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the brothers Grimm, and others. The primacy of culture is an idea that has in the last two hundred years evolved into the social sciences as we know them today and, most brightly, in the discipline of anthropology. It found one of its strongest voices in England in the cultural criticism of Matthew Arnold in the nineteenth century. Arnold's was one of the first English voices to put the matter of “culture” on the intellectual agenda of his time.

To say that culture encompassed a whole series of pursuits such as football matches, cheese-making, and brass bands was one thing, but it was quite another when Arnold wrote that religion and the spiritual life of a people were also part of culture. Objections to this characterization of religion as merely a part of a people's culture were quick in coming. The counterclaim that culture derived ultimately from religion and that the spiritual truths of a people gave birth to any serious notion of culture was put forward in the nineteenth century by those who were seen to be defending an old idea. Progressive opinion already accommodated to the scientific cast of mind and to secularism applauded Arnold's bold claim. All the momentum of persuasion was on the side of the arguments of the secularists and the quick growth of anthropology, sociology, and political economy in the later years of the nineteenth century anchored the proposition in the academy. There were objecting voices of course – John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, and any number of bishops of the Church of England – but the force was with “culture,” not religion, as the nineteenth century ended. For all intents and purposes, the argument was over.

Four Quartets is in many ways a work of purification and purgation, linguistically and morally, and one which strives to “dispossess” itself of the world and its “distractions” in its quest for the absolute. The more severe and homogeneous diction of Eliot's later style, heralded in the 1929 essay on Dante – “one has learned from the Inferno that the greatest poetry can be written with the greatest economy of words, and with the greatest austerity in the use of metaphor, simile, verbal beauty, and elegance” (CP3 712) – means that the multiple discourse of the earlier work – the quotations in foreign languages, the presence of dialect, jazz idiom, nursery rhyme, all The Waste Land's different voices, as well as its multifarious personae – has disappeared. What we rather have in Four Quartets is the “I” persona in a state of prolonged spiritual self-communing within a pronounced doctrinal context, with a good deal of iteration of some of the poem's key points: “You say I am repeating / Something I have said before. I shall say it again” (CPP 181). If this suggests that Four Quartets remains primarily the preserve of the religious interpreter, a significant amount of recent criticism has emphasised historical contexts and occasions, focussing on the poem as a document of the Second World War, and indeed the later three Quartets, East Coker, The Dry Salvages and Little Gidding, published in 1940, 1941 and 1942, respectively, are heavily imbued with wartime experience. But whatever the social, political or “patriotic” interventions Four Quartets can be seen as making, these cannot be divorced from religious positions that heavily inflect the topical commentary the poem has to offer, and to neglect such positions precisely obscures the insistent dialogue between religion and “history” that takes place throughout. In Jed Esty's words, Four Quartets is not “a retreat from history into religion” but a “confrontation” between the two. I will return to this issue at the end of this chapter, pursuing in the meantime the poem's religious narrative particularly in relation to its abiding consciousness that, as Little Gidding puts it, “History may be servitude, / History may be freedom” (CPP 195).

‘The first short stories ever written were of course Jewish short stories.’ The confident, if controversial, claim of the British Jewish writer Gerda Charles (born Edna Lipson) posits the historical Jewish affinity with the short story. What she has in mind are the biblical stories of Joseph and Potiphar's wife (Genesis 39) and the books of Ruth and Esther. In a similar vein, Joseph Leftwich charts the Jewish narrative tradition as a tradition of the short story through legends, fables and parables from the Bible to the Talmud and Rabbinic literature to more recent folk tales and, eventually, the Jewish contribution to the cultural production of the modern nations in languages other than Hebrew or Yiddish.

The focus of this chapter is on the British Jewish short story in English, which in the past has suffered a surprising lack of recognition. There is, to date, no comprehensive anthology, though there have been various attempts in the Anglophone world at anthologizing Jewish short stories. In order to gain a sense of the development of the British Jewish short story and its place in the larger context of English (or perhaps better Anglophone) and Jewish literature it is therefore useful to explore its manifestation in some such collections which are, after all, dedicated to categorization and, at least implicitly, to the negotiation of a canon.

Anthologies, by their very nature, need to define criteria of inclusion and exclusion which extend beyond the question of literary quality. Seen in a comparative historical perspective, such collections accordingly chart shifts in the approach to Jewish secular writing pre- and post-Holocaust, from its emergence in the middle of the nineteenth century to (almost) the present day. Significantly, as such they suggest a trajectory of the global evolution of the Jewish short story while simultaneously indicating, more specifically, patterns of the perception of British Jewish short stories in changing contexts. Indeed, it is possible to discern two putative phases of anthologizing British Jewish short stories in the Anglophone world, which negotiate between these two parameters.

Poets are notoriously resistant to categorisation. In Britain, as elsewhere, the spoken word category encompasses a wide range of poets, a large proportion of whom are black and Asian Britons. Yet, as Kwame Dawes observes, poets who perform their work are often keen to escape such labels as ‘performance poet’. Many poets also regard the terms ‘spoken word poet’ or ‘spoken word artist’ as reductionist. ‘Spoken word poetry’ itself is a contested category, implying the separateness of oral and printed poetry. Such distinctions touch on the sensitive issue of literary status, pointing to a long-standing poetic injustice in Britain whereby influential publishing houses rarely endorse poetry associated with the performance scene. The lack of parity between so-called ‘page’ and ‘stage’ poets points to a long-running, unresolved argument in Britain about what poetry is and who it is for, an argument that reaches back to the British poetry revival of the 1960s.

This chapter challenges some persistent assumptions about spoken word poetry's province and provenance, given the considerable contribution of British black and Asian writers. It places spoken word poetry in the context of the wider devolution of literary culture, emphasising the pivotal role of non-metropolitan localities in its development, to ultimately question the idea that British spoken word poetry is, and always has been, an urban form.

Provenance

It should not be said that poets of the 1980s inaugurated Britain's spoken word scene. More accurately, post-1980s British Asian and British black poets have recuperated and developed British poetry revival poetics, bringing them into dialogue with popular traditions such as dub poetry. This confluence of ideas has proved productive. Spoken word's transnational routes have obscured its 1960s British literary origins and British black and Asian poets, who reinaugurated Britain's ‘submerged’ traditions of performance, collectively integrating the national performance scene into the international world of poetry.

Advocates of spoken word poetry routinely observe that all poetry has its roots in orality. As John Coutts notes, ancient poetry was orally transmitted. The semi-literate medieval world of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales marks the emergence of printed poetry in English literary history, coinciding with the development of the printing press. Male writers especially, including John Agard, Fred D'Aguiar and Linton Kwesi Johnson, are umbilically connected to 1960s British poetry, when the form reached giddy heights of popularity, with charismatic performances in mass readings throughout the country.

In 1945, the English fiction-writer V. S. Pritchett made a telling comment on the ‘disappearance’ of his friend, Mulk Raj Anand. Anand, well known as founding father of the Indian novel in English, had been living in London for over twenty years. A public intellectual and vociferous anti-imperialist, he was active in many different areas of cultural life. Yet, as Pritchett says, reflecting on Anand's sudden departure for India at the end of the war, ‘He vanished…there seems to have been a long silence.’ That silence was partly the silence of war. Before 1939, Britain was an imperial nation, still confident, despite building colonial resistance, of its global role. After 1945, its horizons swiftly began to shift inwards to an island nation, keen to ‘screen out’ the awkward consequences of its declining empire from its field of vision. Pritchett would certainly have been aware of the changing landscape of a blitz-torn nation, struggling, despite victory, to cope with the changed economic, political and social realities of the post-war world. The ‘silence’ intimated here, however, was primarily a cultural one: what Stuart Hall was later to call a ‘profound historical forgetfulness’ or wilful ‘amnesia’, that has continued for decades in accounts of British history. Although this gap in the cultural historiography of the nation has now begun to be addressed by a post-1990s generation of scholars keen to thicken the ‘lines’ of the ‘black in the Union Jack’, there remains a general failure to recognise the extent to which the map of English literature has always been forged from its mixed colonial past.

Britain has had a heterogeneous migrant population for well over 400 years, correspondent to its empire abroad, making the imperial centre as much the ‘home’ of the colonial encounter as were the colonies themselves, situated on the so-called peripheries. As W. E. B. Du Bois noted in 1911, not only was the ‘Empire’ a ‘coloured’ empire but the streets of London were increasingly revealing ‘this fact’. The more visible presence of several generations of African, Caribbean and Asian ‘immigrants’ in the decades after World War II was not simply an effect of the residue of empire (‘you are here because we were there’) but the culmination of a long and more intimate relationship.

In Samuel Selvon's watershed novel The Lonely Londoners (1957), the character ‘Captain’, in finding himself at a loss for a girl, decides to take home a woman described as ‘hustling there, dress up nice, wearing fur coat, and every time when the boys pass she saying “Bon soir” in a hoarse voice’. Days later, the Captain's bar buddies discover that ‘this “Bon soir” woman’ was not one at all, but actually ‘a test who used to dress up like a woman and patrol the area’. Selvon's comic use of transsexuality to parody the sexual peccadilloes of his avowedly heterosexual male characters, Captain and Moses, comprises a significant literary point in the ur-history of sexuality and race in Britain. Although the representation is comical, it introduces black men encountering alternative genders and sexualities within the novel's resolutely heterosexual framework.

The possibility of alternative modes of sexual expression in racially marked communities, brought up (though foreclosed) by Selvon in 1957, are realities more overtly articulated, some decades later, by Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer poets, novelists and dramatists of Asian, African and Caribbean descent in Britain. The meta-context of hetero-normativity and hegemonic whiteness is challenged both creatively and critically in LGBTQ representations by writers including Barbara Burford, Hanif Kureishi, Maud Sulter, Jackie Kay, Luke Sutherland, Suniti Namjoshi, Dorothea Smartt, Seni Seneviratne and Bidisha. Their work forms an aesthetic legacy of LGBTQ perspectives – whether or not these are centralised in individual texts, or are by people who might not personally identify as such. While a number of these writers also wrote for the theatre, playwrights Jacqueline Rudet, Valerie Mason-John, Rikki Beadle-Blair, DeObia Oparei, Ash Kotak and Ayub Khan-Din brought representations of gay sexuality to the fore in the liveness of the stage environment. In doing so, they reinforced a presence in a cultural arena that traditionally sidelined or ignored Britain's racial and ethnic diversity, even as it increasingly accommodated queer theatre. Through their critical writing, Kobena Mercer, Pratibha Parmar, Sara Ahmed and Rohit K. Dasgupta have developed cultural commentary and theoretical frameworks within which the agencies of LGBTQ works can be better recognised and analysed. Thus, creatively and polemically these writers and thinkers reclaim perspectives previously hidden from view in culture (and historically persecuted), to rewrite and liberate expectations of sexuality and textuality through examining race and its significances.

The period 1980–2010 saw an increase and diversification in writing by black and Asian writers in the UK, augmented thematically and aesthetically by work from generations born and/or educated in Britain and their new configurations of questions of difference and identity. While often marked by the effects of racism and social exclusion, the writing of this period offers imaginative insights into new diasporic communities, with perspectives on colonial history, the slave trade, the effects of the rise of global Islamism and what Stuart Hall has called ‘multicultural drift’. The context for this writing is a Britain undergoing major social and cultural changes, driven in part by increased immigration, ongoing struggles over discrimination, racialised inequalities, the nature and content of education, and debates over what it means to be British.

Although racial discrimination was made illegal in the 1970s, the process of transforming institutional and interpersonal racism has been slow, and is an ongoing theme in contemporary literary and dramatic work. Authors use a broad spectrum of literary forms, including narrative fiction, autobiography, poetry and drama, frequently experimenting with transgeneric approaches that can interweave, fragment and transform these forms. While significant numbers of works have been discussed in the media and at literary festivals, and short-listed for literary and dramatic prizes, others remain less widely known. Paul Warmington foregrounds the link between formal education (schooling) and education as cultural survival (with a broader remit of cultural longevity), where ‘Black Britain has produced many intellectual, cultural and educational spaces outside formal settings: supplementary schools, independent community education projects, reading circles, grassroots journals, bookshops and publishing houses’. The strategy of small presses publishing both unknown and established writers has been important in building audiences for new writers. In addition to black and Asian publishing initiatives, community publishers such as Centreprise and feminist publishers Sheba Press, the Women's Press and Virago created access to work which did not always receive mainstream attention. Following on from presses established in the 1960s and 1970s, further small influential publishers emerged during the 1980s. Mantra Publications (1984–) specialises in fiction about British Asian life (often bi-lingual) aimed at young audiences and has among its titles prize-winning texts by Sailesh Ramakrishnan and Ravinder Randhawa.

In 1965, the International Social Service of Great Britain collaborated with the Sociology Department of Bedford College, University of London, to set up the British Adoption Project. The Project's aim was to offer particular support in securing adoption placements for fifty-three children described as ‘born in Britain of Asian, African, West Indian or mixed racial parentage’. The necessity of the Project emerged from a perceived anomaly in adoption practices more widely in post-war Britain: namely, that while such children constituted a minority of infants in care and awaiting adoption, a disproportionate number of ‘coloured’ children, to use the problematic racialising terminology at the time, struggled to be placed in adoptive families. Although official records were rarely kept, Diana Kareh noted in 1970 that:

The incidence of such children in the care system was due to a number of factors. The biggest constituency were mixed-race, placed in care usually by white birth-mothers struggling to cope with the social stigma attached to conceiving a child both illegitimately and with a black partner. Few such women were able to contend with the formidable economic difficulties involved in raising a child as a lone parent remote from the support of partners or family. In such dire social straits, surrendering children seemed the best way of providing a more secure future for them. Other black and mixed-race children were placed in care or with foster-families by parents seeking to cope on modest incomes, but who sought to maintain contact when they could, and hoped one day to bring them back into a family environment – a phenomenon recorded in Isha McKenzie-Mavinga and Thelma Perkins's memoir, In Search of Mr McKenzie: Two Sisters’ Quest for an Unknown Father (1991). Birth-parents who surrendered black and mixed-race children into care were often hard-up migrants, poor working-class couples, or single women, often white, with meagre, if any, means of support.

Introduction

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a pivotal generation of black cultural theorists came of age in Britain, opening up both academia and wider public spaces to emergent black voices. Their locus was the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), then helmed by Stuart Hall at the University of Birmingham. Most, including Paul Gilroy, Hazel Carby, Kobena Mercer and Claire Alexander, are still active and influential. These cultural theorists have worked in academic spaces but have also been conscious of themselves as writers, part of the wider flow of African-Caribbean and Asian writing in Britain with which this volume is concerned. As black writers, they were among the first to take culture in Britain as the legitimate object of their work; as theorists, they developed a still resonant language for articulating black experiences in Britain, a language that continues to help us understand ‘black Britain’ in the context of wider post-colonial flux. Hall, Gilroy and their peers helped shift the gaze of black British writing because they understood Britain not in terms of migration and exile, but from the standpoint of permanent black presence. They wrote ‘from the inside’, even if their belonging was still contested, and, in doing so, they helped shape the grammar of second- and third-generation black British writing, a grammar that we still speak, and that still speaks for us.

The influence of black British cultural theory endures in the current century regardless of the continued ambivalence of academia towards black thinkers. Over the past three decades it has modelled a consciously disruptive and revisionist role for black writing in Britain, post-war and post-empire. In some senses, attempting to assess the ‘legacy’ of these thinkers feels at odds with cultural theory's own scepticism towards notions of legacy, heritage and tradition. On the other hand, it would be disingenuous to explore critical outlooks at the start of the twenty-first century without acknowledging the pervasive influence of cultural theory on literary criticism. In addition, this chapter also considers current claims that while the influence of black cultural theory persists, there has arguably been a slowing of a certain kind of black critical writing in Britain.

Fred D'Aguiar begins his 1989 article ‘Against Black British Literature’ with the simple, yet provocative, declaration that ‘there is no Black British literature, there is only literature with its usual variants of class, sex, race, time and place’. For D'Aguiar, belief in a single unifying category of ‘Black’ writing fails to register the manifold ways that works placed under this heading intersect with other texts, and ignores the fact that ‘Britishness’ has grown into a more capacious category, no longer in need of modification, in the wake of World War II. It is better, he argues, to place ‘black creativity’ alongside that of everyone, to ‘subsume’ it ‘into the various schools and ideologies governing creativity nation-wide’ and recognise that blacks ‘are as multifarious one alongside the other as the variety among white British’. D'Aguiar's argument hinges on the way he renders the creative drive as a boundless, restless, active force, one incapable of being ‘contained for long in any fashion or vice-hold which the process of naming and compartmentalizing seeks to promote’. Creativity necessarily transcends borders and ignores ‘passports’, and thus the words ‘black’ and ‘British’ can only fail, like any words that seek to fix concepts and canons of artistic talent, to capture the variety within and among the works and authors they try to describe.

As D'Aguiar sustains his claim that writing defined as ‘Black British’ breaks the boundaries of both words, he does make one concession. While, for him, ‘Black British literature’ does not exist, he admits that black British experience does – that there are unities in the lives of those dubbed ‘black’ that are driven, at least in part, by confrontations with ‘racism and alienation’ across the country. Despite the striking nature of his article's opening, D'Aguiar's argument as a whole closely follows Salman Rushdie's 1983 polemic against the now out-dated phrase ‘Commonwealth Literature’. Like D'Aguiar, Rushdie railed against ghettoisation, arguing the ‘Commonwealth’ category posited its objects as ‘a bunch of upstarts’ and altered ‘the meaning of the far broader term “English literature”…into something far narrower, something topographical, nationalistic, possibly even racially segregationist’.

The Politics of Language

In his lectures on the History of the Voice (1979), Barbadian poet and historian (Edward) Kamau Brathwaite claims that the poetic traditions and linguistic standards imposed by British colonialism are inept at representing Caribbean experiences. Stressing the alienating effects of colonial education, Brathwaite argues that the rhythms of English poetry, particularly the prevalence of the iambic pentameter, are incompatible with Caribbean speech rhythms and intonations: ‘In other words, we haven't got the syllables, the syllabic intelligence, to describe the hurricane, which is our own experience, whereas we can describe the imported alien experience of the snowfall.’ As ‘the hurricane does not roar in pentameters’, the imposition of English poetic traditions onto Caribbean worlds inevitably yields figurative misrepresentations and distortions.

To move beyond European conventions and alienating structures, Brathwaite, together with a number of other Afro-Caribbean male writers (John La Rose, Andrew Salkey, James Berry and E. A. Markham), engaged with the social and political nature of language. Foregrounding the sonic dimension of black orality, these writers, in different yet interrelated ways, worked towards establishing a Caribbean poetics, to give voice to Caribbean realities and assert alternative modes of expression. Although initially designed as a localized diction in the service of post-colonial nation-building, this poetics was carried along post-war migratory routes, giving rise to a rich and varied black British tradition. The intentional focus upon this cluster of male poets is accounted for chronologically (they were published from the 1960s and 1970s) and by no means discounts the ground-breaking work of Trinidadian-born Amryl Johnson and Jamaican-born Valerie Bloom, poet-performers whose work showcases the dexterities of Creole and patois and was published from the 1980s onwards.

According to Brathwaite, Caribbean poetic diction should be based on ‘nation language’, a Creole variety to which English may give ‘some of its lexical features’ but which ‘in its contours, its rhythm and timbre, its sound explosions…is not English’. Nation language, as defined by Brathwaite, is shaped by a largely suppressed African heritage that comes to the fore in specific words, syntactic forms and sounds of the language. In nation language, standard English has already been recast into genuinely Caribbean speech patterns so the use of this local variety displaces the authority of colonial norms.