Other Britain, Other British: Contemporary Multicultural Fiction - A. Robert Lee

Britain's colonial past stalks every corner of the world - from street-names and restaurants to second and third generation "immigrant" communities. These embrace people from backgrounds as diverse as the Caribbean, Asia, Africa and Australia and New Zealand. In literary terms another Britain is being formulated, one largely but not exclusively non-white. Who have been the writers involved? What vision of Britain do they offer? How has their imagining of the culture differed?;The novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah takes on two of the pre-eminent names, VS Naipaul and Salman Rushdie. In turn, Stewart Brown looks at Gurnah's own fiction, that of an East African confronting a supposed motherland. Lyn Innes considers a generation of writers who make women their focus, among them Caryl Phillips, Ravinder Randhawa, Joan Riley and Buchi Emecheta. Susheila Nasta examines the emigrant generation at the heart of Sam Sevlon's novels. Louis James evaluates the achievement of George Lamming, longtime student of an evolving multicultural Britain. A. Robert Lee considers four first-novel writers, Mike Phillips, David Dabydeen, Hanif Kureishi and Pauline Melville. A further essay compares the fiction of Timothy Mo and Kasuo Ishiguro. Finally Rod Edmond looks at the antipodean "Britishers", a tradition of Australian and New Zealand fiction.