It is perhaps no longer enough to talk about the role of history in post-war Black British literature. The gradual emergence of historical subjects within this writing over the last sixty years itself needs to be historicised. The canon of the 1950s is characterised by novels and short stories unfolding in the present. Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Ways of Sunlight (1957), E. R. Braithwaite's To Sir With Love (1959), George Lamming's The Emigrants (1954) and Andrew Salkey's Escape to an Autumn Pavement (1960) are all published in early post-war London, and set in early post-war London. The same is true of the 1960s and 1970s: Beryl Gilroy's Black Teacher (1976), Buchi Emecheta's In the Ditch (1972) and Second-Class Citizen (1974), Farrukh Dhondy's short-story collections East End at Your Feet (1976) and Come to Mecca (1978), and Linton Kwesi Johnson's poems Dread Beat and Blood (1975) are all works that capture with dramatic immediacy the pressing political period in which they were published. History is certainly not absent from this period of writing, whether as the modernist nightmare evoked in the epigraph to Lamming's The Pleasures of Exile (1960) – ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake (James Joyce)’ – or as wistful ‘oldtalk’ in Selvon's The Lonely Londoners. Nevertheless, from the 1970s on it is possible to speak of a distinct historical turn in Black British and British Asian literature. The 1980s and 1990s in particular saw a proliferation of texts dealing with the history of slavery, a subject that was relatively neglected within Black British writing until that point. Many of these texts might be said to evoke what Stuart Hall has called ‘the outside history that is inside the history of the English’, stories that unfold largely overseas but that are constitutive of the British past. Since the 1990s, writers have also focused increasingly on the ‘internal’ history of post-1945 black settlement to the extent that we could now reconstruct a domestic story of the post-war British past through its historical representation in Black literature. World War II forms a focal point in Dennis Ferdinand's Duppy Conqueror (1998), Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2001) and Andrea Levy's Small Island (2004).

In a post-war migratory, cultural trajectory that was articulated initially and predominantly by men, black and Asian women writers in Britain have used prose fiction to achieve literary self-determination. Broadly defined as the agency to author one's identity against a prescriptive social order, the recognition of this self-determination forms a matrilineal alternative to the ‘malestream’, and restores women's creativities and perspectives to contemporary British literature and its post-war history. In this chapter ‘(British) Asian’ indicates writers whose ancestral origins emanate from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, whereas ‘black (British)’ refers to recent authors whose provenances hail from African and Caribbean heritages. This distinguishes the categories from an earlier point in post-war history where the term ‘Black British identity’ was initially constructed along the axis of oppression, and anti-colonial movements in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean fuelled the sense of solidarity between African-Caribbean and South Asian people in Britain. According to Avtar Brah, the term ‘Black British’ first gained currency in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and was adopted by African-Caribbean and South Asian organisations that used the designation for ‘constituting a political subject inscribing politics of resistance against colored-centered racisms’. Many British Asians, however, chafed at this deployment of a unitary Blackness as its organising principle, which often subsumed the life stories of Asian Britons under its homogenous order – just as it ignored the substantial differences between the cultures of African and Caribbean nations. While there may be some valence to this objection, we must also remember that it originates from a racialising, economic and class bias, since upper- and middle-income Asians were generally the ones who staunchly objected to being called ‘black’.

Nonetheless, the racialised experiences of non-white people in Britain have always shared some common themes. Black British remains a useful mode to understand how disenfranchised groups have articulated a powerful sense of community solidarity – not just against unofficial on-the-streets racism, but also the official racism of the Thatcher-led state, which was inordinately successful in promoting ethnic and gender divisions. As Beatrix Campbell notes, Margaret Thatcher's ‘political project was the antithesis to the equality project’. Moreover, in proudly recalibrating a word historically laden with pejorative connotations, ‘Black British’ exemplifies the self-authoring practices within a hegemonic discourse that form the argumentative crux of this chapter.

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.

Book fairs, like anthologies, have always played a significant role in literary canonisation, which, Roy Sommer reminds us, is a ‘matter of inclusion as well as exclusion’. Illustrations of this statement abound in relation to Black British writing. From 1982 to 1995 the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books – initiated through a collective led by John La Rose – contributed to positioning emerging black authors as part of the British literary scene, while also showcasing the international character and the radicalism usually associated with the Black literary tradition. Today, however, in the context of book fairs, Black writing from Britain seems to have become relatively less noticeable. The 2014 Brussels Book Fair, whose ‘guest of honour’ was the UK, might be taken as a measure of this development. It is indeed striking that of the twenty-three ‘top’ British authors present (the most famous being Jonathan Coe), none had roots in Africa, Asia or the Caribbean, with the exception of two white writers born respectively in Zambia and Tunisia, A. C. Grayling and Patrick McGuinness. When one considers that the event had been put together by the British Council, the British Embassy and the bookseller Waterstones, and that the theme was ‘History, in all its aspects…notably, the Centenary Commemoration of the First World War’, this all-white line up does not bode well for the way Britain sees her past and, more worryingly, how she represents herself culturally in the heart of Europe. Even though books by Zadie Smith and Monica Ali were for sale in the Fair's Waterstones bookshop, the Britain showcased that week was, to say the least, misleading in ignoring the considerable contributions made by black and Asian writers to British literary history and heritage.

Although an anecdotal observation of one European book fair only, it is symptomatic of what is perceived informally as a decreasing visibility of British Black and Asian writing in non-academic contexts, in media coverage, in Britain's cultural institutions and in places of cultural dissemination. Whereas from the 1990s and into the 2000s, the British Council actively promoted contemporary literature by non-white British writers, nationally and internationally, this organisation is now less prominent on the literary stage, and when it is, as at the Brussels book fair, it seems to be less attentive than in the past to Britain's cultural diversity.

Realism – its definition, relevance and usefulness – continues to fuel animated debates in literary criticism. Often pitted against modernism – another notoriously slippery term – realism is seen as the naïve and transparent ‘other’. With its formal avant-gardist experiments, modernism for long seemed to have trumped realism; of course, this trumping depended on prior reductive assumptions that realism's representationalism is unsophisticated, overtly political and wanting in formal experimentation, all of which are seen as liabilities. Realism, as George Levine pronounced, ‘seems now to be a tired subject and to revive it is to risk repetition and boredom’. But he was quick to note that it is ‘impossible finally either to provide it with consistently precise definition or to banish it’. In other words, realism has been a persistent presence in literary production – sometimes reviled and rejected, and at other times embraced and revived. Andrzej Gasiorek has offered a more measured view on the realism–modernism debates, arguing that ‘the claim that experimental writing is inherently radical’ is ‘as mistaken as the counter-claim that realism is a fundamentally conservative form’.

Following Brecht, one might add that realism's success or failure, its radicalism or conservatism, can only be assessed in context: in its ability to represent new problems that demand new methods. In examining the possibilities that realism continues to offer, despite claims of the form's exhaustion, one might side with James Wood's conclusion that it is the pyrotechniques of avant-gardist formula, not realism, that is exhausted. Taking issue with novels where ‘stories and sub-stories sprout on every page’ in ‘bonhomous, punning, lively prose’, Wood invented a new category for this style: hysterical realism. In novels such as Salman Rushdie's The Ground beneath Her Feet (1999) and Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000) he finds that ‘conventions of realism are being exhausted, and overworked’.

What, then, might a new kind of realism, neither exhausted nor hysterical, look like? In what follows, I examine selected novels written in the 1990s and 2000s by black British authors to rethink the overly hasty dismissal of realism and to suggest, following Fredric Jameson, that the novels instantiate ‘a new realist project’.

Multiculturalism has not permeated the British theatre complex to the same degree that it has informed subject matter in poetry and prose writing – despite the fact that the live body on stage is a personal and potent reminder of social presence. When social diversity does not translate into socially proportionate theatre-going demographics, this reveals much about the theatre complex itself. Three elements inspired, established and shaped what, during the 1980s, came to be broadly defined as post-war ‘Black British Theatre’: the Caribbean diaspora, race and class. In part through their drama, this Caribbean-heritage community began, from the 1970s, to contribute to a change in conceptualising what it means to be British, where ‘black British dramatists’ refers primarily to those whose families originated in the Caribbean but, increasingly since the 1990s, from Africa.

However, this has not been a straightforward process, as even the term Black British Theatre has been contested by black dramatists and practitioners. In 2009, the playwright Roy Williams argued that British theatre continues to be controlled by white people and that non-whites are marginalized. He wished to assert difference: ‘Personally I love the phrase “black theatre”, and I think we need it to ensure we are heard. Theatre sounds po-faced and white; “black theatre” sounds intriguing, daring.’ Whereas Dawn Walton, artistic director of the Eclipse Theatre Company (which aims to combat institutional racism throughout the theatre and produce work by black dramatists), argues, ‘to suggest that black theatre has to have an all-black – or even majority black – cast would eliminate plays like stoning mary by debbie tucker green or Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads by Roy Williams from the canon of black British theatre’ and ‘to define black British theatre in terms of race alone is to miss the point’.

This chapter will explore why writing for the stage was an important contributor to the development of a culturally political syntax as derived from the African and Caribbean diaspora. However, when fashioned to represent second-generation, British-based experiences, its dramatists became overwhelmingly associated with one genre, that of social realism.

In the US, the twenty-first century is powered, in poetic terms, by what its central literary journal recently named ‘the new lyric studies’. It focused fora on the return of interest in lyric as a genre, while millennial poetry anthologies argued that, after long rule by ‘Language poetry’ (America's powerful avant-garde defined, in part, against lyric writing), we had entered an era of the ‘post-avant’, and that poets of all stripes were returning to lyric in new-century work. There are connections between this phenomenon and the burgeoning use of lyric in the work of black British poets. The reasons for having (to a lesser extent) sidelined lyric for a time are different for the latter, of course, and the reasons for re-exploring it are as various as the poets who will be treated here. But they add up to more than the pendulum swing that in part accounts for lyric's return stateside, where primarily aesthetic concerns drive the mix-and-matching of modes dubbed the new American hybridity. This chapter will consider the differing reasons for lyric's return in black British poetics by first taking a broad look at the field, and then by attending to the work of several poets publishing most visibly since the millennium – ranging from innovative writers acclaimed by the mainstream, like Patience Agbabi, to those whose work has been so new in texture, tone and project that they still do not appear on many poetic maps, like D. S. Marriott. I want to argue, as I have in the past, that lyric, in the general sense of being ‘the genre of personal expression’, as Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins describe it in The Lyric Theory Reader, has always been crucial to raced poetry in the UK because it queries that tacit collation of the personal and universal – a collation that ironically makes lyric the least personal of genres, in a sense (or in theory). After postmodernism's thorough-going investigations of how language overwrites the (‘generalised’) subject, post-postmodern lyric investigations of neglected subjectivities are proving increasingly necessary in black British work.

The uses and functions of autobiography as witnessing, testimony or as autoethnography continue to present as urgent questions of authority, ethics, legitimacy and truth. These are the issues that have become the central preoccupation of autobiographical theory and criticism. The privileging of these autobiographical forms by writers marginalised in Anglo-European traditions of literature and criticism has provided an opportunity for writers and critics to invigorate a form that has looked increasingly ‘disreputable and self-indulgent’ and to extend autobiography's limits, while not abandoning its commitment to an authorial presence that is generically defined. The autobiographical self, while central to the narratives discussed in this chapter, occupies multiple subject positions: at the borders and in the margins of dominant discourses of race, gender and nationality, but also at the centre of a growing body of self-representation that seeks to replace the ‘white male story’ with the whole story of lives made hitherto invisible. The diversity and instability of the selves that black British women's autobiography constructs serve as a caution against an insistence on the authority of marginalised voices that in the process reproduce ‘the imperializing tendencies of the old Cartesian self’. Necessary safeguards need to be erected against both the articulation of either an exceptional exemplar or an overdetermining ‘we’.

As Kate Douglas has noted, critical examinations of autobiography and autobiographical forms provide a perfect location from which issues of generic identity, authority and authorship, as well as complex questions of voice and subjectivity (who is speaking, and from where), continue to be negotiated. In addition, as a site where the public and private interconnect, autobiography provides a space in literary criticism for the exploration of issues of narrative responsibility and the ethics of disclosure. These intra- and extra-textual entanglements are the contexts within which identities – gendered, cultural, social and political – are interrogated, disturbed and reconfigured. Within the space of this short, exploratory chapter my focus is, therefore, necessarily narrow. It is impossible to address in detail the complexities of black/Black, British, gendered identities, and so I follow the tendency in contemporary literary criticism to use ‘black’ to denote authors and protagonists of African heritage. I have also structured a discussion of selected texts around their representation of experiences of trauma that perhaps inevitably, as I demonstrate, characterise contemporary autobiographical self-articulation.

The Western reader who sits down to read the literary works most Hindus would identify as classics is often in for a surprise, especially about the way in which religious and theological discourse cohabits with aesthetic expression and popular piety in these texts. In the Hindu context the interaction between religion and literature is usually assumed to be benign and often symbiotic: literary expression reflects religious texts and values and religious specialists welcome the support of literary expression. In the Judeo-Christian world, by contrast, there is an inherent tension between religion – or more precisely revelation – and poetics: theologians and clergymen have often cast a nervous eye on the arts, and artists and writers find they must defy the clerics and their orthodoxies to express themselves fully. Blasphemy – or at least transgression – acts as a kind of strange attractor for Western artists, and it is often a major source of the energy that drives their choices of form, genre, and trope. It is not so in the canonical works of Hinduism: the Mahabharata (and its embedded lyrical drama, the Bhagavad Gita), the Ramayana, and the play Shakuntala to name only the most revered.

Before attempting to sketch the aesthetic and theological issues at stake in this difference, it is probably wise to canvas briefly the vexed question of the definition of Hinduism and its relationship to Sanskrit, the language in which these classics were originally written and performed. In the first place, religious studies specialists today generally like to repeat what has become a truism: that Hinduism is a relatively late and artificial portmanteau term whose frequent use is a colonial artifact under which are grouped a vast array of diverse religious views and practices. As such – or so the argument goes – Hinduism is no more than a convenient term imposed from without on phenomena that are otherwise quite disparate and cannot be addressed except on a case-by-case basis.

It is arguably the case, however, that the term “Hinduism” is nevertheless indispensable, both as a gateway to understanding and as pointing to a conceptual unity and existential stance toward life among these practices and viewpoints that most Hindus themselves assume to underlie their religious traditions.

Logica Vetus (or Old Logic, hereafter LV) is the set of logical works that had been in circulation in the Latin West before the wave of new translations of Aristotle's remaining logical treatises, called Logica Nova (or New Logic, LN), became available. These treatises cover fundamental philosophical issues, including the division of everything into categories, the nature of the relationship between language, thought and reality, the structure of linguistic terms and sentences, the character of definitions, the status of universals, modal reasoning, and the nature of truth, to name just the big topics. LV is sometimes thought of as Boethian logic, since all but one of the texts were made available by the hand of the fifth-century Boethius (c. 480–525/6). Boethius aimed to translate from Greek to Latin all the works of Plato and Aristotle and to provide detailed commentaries on them, although only Aristotle's Categories and On Interpretation, as well as an introduction to the Categories, called Isagoge, written by the third-century Neoplatonist Porphyry (c. 234–c. 305), were transmitted to the Latin West. Medieval scholars also inherited from Boethius lengthy commentaries written to explain every line of the original material and, since Boethius’ habit was to refer to other ancient commentators’ critical arguments and interpretations when giving his own, these commentaries preserved a rich heritage of the late ancient reception of Aristotelian logic. In addition to Isagoge, Categories and On Interpretation, the LV included a twelfth-century treatise written to supplement Categories, known as Book of Six Principles (Liber de sex principiis, hereafter LSP). While other Boethian treatises were included in this set in the twelfth century, they gradually fell out of circulation when the LN became available.

The texts of LV played a major role in university instruction. Taking note of how they were studied provides insight into the ways they were interpreted. Accordingly the first section of this chapter will outline the ways this material was used by masters and students. Given that philosophers often engaged in metalogical reflections about the subject matter of logic itself, a brief review of the principal shifts in the characterizations of logic during this period will follow.

INTRODUCTION

In the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the writings of Aristotle became central to the logic curriculum (see Chapters 4 and 5). However, in a number of new developments, some topics with which Aristotle had not been concerned now began to make an appearance, and went on to become crucial within the tradition. These innovations were not regarded as an alternative to the Aristotelian logic, but rather supplemented it under the heading “logic of the moderns” (logica moderna or logica modernorum) (De Rijk 1962–1967). Probably the most prominent among the new topics were the doctrines of the so-called properties of terms (proprietates terminorum), which are generally considered the basis for later medieval semantic theorising and adjacent issues.

Terms (termini) in the technical sense presupposed here (and pointing to the “terminist” tradition) are descriptive words which function as subject or predicate in a proposition. The basic idea of the “properties” (or terministic) approach is that an analysis of the semantics of (compound) linguistic expressions should proceed by analysing the semantic properties of the terms occurring in it. In handbooks of logic from the later Middle Ages, the treatment of the properties started with signification (significatio), the capacity of terms to function as signs; supposition (suppositio), the property of terms functioning as subject or predicate in propositions, was its centrepiece, but the framework also covered related properties like copulation, appellation, ampliation, restriction, and distribution.

In the earlier stages of development, supposition had been one among the other properties with equal standing. From the works of Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard and other less-well-known or anonymous authors, supposition theory began to emerge in the (late) twelfth century, and was then further developed through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Though clearly dependent on grammarian traditions (Ashworth 2010, 152ff.) and closely connected with the theory of fallacies in its early stages, later on the framework developed in response to a variety of sometimes divergent needs in clarifying truth conditions, investigating the validity of inference forms, and making ontological commitments explicit. It is thus important to keep in mind that both across the centuries and in terms of different applications, the doctrines of the properties of terms form a rather heterogeneous collection in terms of function and application, as well as in terms of details of the machinery (Read 2015).

In this chapter we discuss, first, how the Arabic logicians up to the end of the tenth century took over Greek material and added to it material of their own and how they reshaped the subject of logic in the process. We have included references to the young Averroes, although he wrote in the twelfth century, inasmuch as he belongs in the tradition of al-Fārābī (d. 950). After this we turn to the formal innovations of Avicenna's in the early eleventh century. Many of the questions that we discuss are treated also in Street (2004).

THE GREEK LOGICAL HERITAGE

Arabic logic as a branch of philosophy was heir to ancient Greek logic, and it belonged essentially to the Peripatetic tradition. Arabic grammar, Islamic jurisprudence and Islamic disputative theology (kalām) developed independent methods of reasoning and inevitably there was some interaction between these methods and those of logic as a philosophical discipline. This interaction ranged from conflict to absorption. The Greek Peripatetic logic was embodied in Aristotle's logical texts, which later became known as the Organon, together with the commentaries on them by Roman Empire scholars of various philosophical persuasions. These commentaries were the product of an activity which had run for eight centuries when the Arab philosophers became aware of it.

The Arabic Organon was in fact the extended Organon first contemplated in Late Antiquity, which began with Porphyry's Isagoge as an introduction and went on to include Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics. But what was only programmatic in Late Antiquity became a reality for the Arabic logicians. They conceived the Organon as embodying a system of logic. The formal heart of the system lay in its third book, the Prior Analytics, which aims to give the general theory of reasoning or of the syllogism (qiyās). The first two treatises, i.e. Categories (although its place here was challenged, in particular by Avicenna) and On Interpretation, are preparatory to the formal part. The remaining volumes adapt the theory of reasoning to different fields of human activity: to scientific activity, but also to social fields of communication. Logic as providing a method for science was the object of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, while logic as providing a tool in order to systematise various fields of social communication was the object of the rest of the books of the Organon.