ABSTRACT |
Following the lead of historians like Peter Fryer in Staying Power:
The History of Black People in Britain (1984), a number of fictions
in recent years have produced visions of a British past that explode a
prevalent myth about the history of Britain, the belief that the first
black settlers in the country were the people who arrived on the SS
Empire Windrush in 1948 and started a wave of immigration from the
Caribbean, Africa and Asia. Two significant examples of recent fictions
of the past that reclaim (hi)stories of a pre-Windrush Britain that
include black people are Cambridge (1991) by Caryl Phillips and
The Emperor’s Babe (2001) by Bernardine Evaristo. They use two
very different approaches to the re-inscription of black history, since
Cambridge employs a pastiche of nineteenth-century language in a
narrative that provides frequent echoes of Olaudah Equiano’s 1789
autobiography, while Evaristo’s novel-in-verse is a wild extravaganza
full of blatant anachronisms that flout any illusion of historical
verisimilitude. In their very different ways, however, both novels
explore through their fictions of the past what it means to belong in
Britain in the present, since they complicate the vision of the
country’s past as homogeneous and make a contribution to the acceptance
of plurality and hybridity in the present, so that the understanding
that Britain has had a long a complex history of immigration prior to
the post-war movements can be perceived as not undermining but enriching
what it means to be British.
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