Postcolonial London

This course will consider London as a postcolonial metropolis, former seat of empire, and an important site in the transatlantic slave trade. Primary course texts will include novels, plays, films, and poetry by writers who migrated (or were born to migrants) from the West Indies, Africa, and South Asia, who reside(d) in London and made it the setting of their work. 

Taking London as a focus for postcolonial literature allows us to consider the mid-twentieth century history of decolonization from the vantage point of the former imperial center. Some of the writers we'll read arrived in London between 1948 and 1981—that is, between two iterations of the British Nationality Act, the first of which opened British citizenship to colonial subjects, and the second of which established restrictions on immigration from the former colonies that had been imposed in the 1960s and 70s. “Postcolonial London” has thus been shaped by the history of empire and decolonization, these waves of migration, and resistance to them. We'll consider the importance of the “Windrush generation”—writers from the West Indies who began to arrive in 1948 to rebuild postwar Britain—to the tradition of "Black British" writing, as well as the work of later arrivals and second-generation writers.