The Rise of Black British Consciousness and Its Effects on British Cultural Identity

Assuming the arrival of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks (Essex) in 1948 as a historical and cultural watershed, the chapter examines the renewed (self-)perception of British identity that the literary practices ensuing from the event itself brought about from the inception of the second half of the twentieth century to the first decades of the third millennium. Through the lenses of a multi-layered interpretative model conjugating the theoretical tenets of Gender, Post-colonial and (Black) British Cultural Studies, the analysis will focus on the complex representational dynamics of the pluralisation of British cultural identity as activated particularly in the realm of literature thanks to innovatively interwoven formal and thematic solutions. The imaginative space of the literary works examined (among which those by Bernardine Evaristo in particular are worthy of specific critical scrutiny) will thus prove to be permeated by the fruitful porosity between forms of generic contamination – absorbing, most notably, the fluid stylistic formulas of orality – and, on a thematic level, by oppositional hyphenated subjectivities conversant with Anglophone diasporic backgrounds. In light of the specific critical perspective adopted, the undecidability of the generic level is to be seen as deliberately interconnected with the complex spectrum of the new identity models – from (post-)colonial to British Asian and Black British subjectivities. In turn, the deriving cross-cultural mosaics, with their often contradictory negotiations, as well as the development of related areas of literary criticism are interpreted as arenas of political transformation intended to progressively dismantle the traditionally exclusionary construct of British monolithic whiteness.