Eva Ulrike Pirker

Britishness beyond the New Britain: British identities and the identity of Britain in recent black and Asian British Writing

The articles in this collection explore issues of identity in a range of black and Asian British writing of the new millennium: they analyse works of fiction, biography and drama that in recent years have continued to create visions of Britain as a multi-ethnic, culturally diverse nation. However, they also anticipate or register the new political climate in which such visions have, once more, become questioned and scrutinized. Conviviality in Britain is challenged from within and without, as discourses about new forms of migration, fundamentalism, surveillance, regionalism and British–European relations suggest. In an article published in 2010, John McLeod noted in recent black British writing “a revisioned articulation of the nation that is distinctly polycultural, even post-racial” (2010, 51). But is the Britain that these works portray really moving beyond race, as McLeod seems to contend? Didn’t the “happy multiculturalism” of New Labour rather come to an end with the “happy nineties” (Žižek 2006, 80), as British politics and societal debates in the wake of 9/11, 7/7, the recent financial crisis and the “London Riots” suggest? While in the year 2000 Paul Gilroy postulated the utopian possibility of a post-racial and post-ethnic society where the “old, modern idea of ‘race’ can have no ethically defensible place” (Gilroy 2000, 6), in the summer of 2013 he seemed less certain about this change when he bleakly assumed that “the very best we can hope for may be that the old chestnuts of whiteness and blackness will fade away into generic, market-based identities or ‘life styles’ ” (Gilroy 2013, 557), implicitly suggesting the return of old and new aspects of belonging, configured along the lines of class. And indeed, emblems of this new order are visible in British cities from the metropolis (the “Shard” depicted on the cover of this issue is only one famous example) to the north, where global corporate culture and European Union funding schemes have paired up to give birth to the “Renaissance North”, the beneficiaries of which remain, however, ominously familiar, and not those in most need. Such schemes could not prevent the existentially threatening effects on large sections of society of the 2008 financial crisis – or perhaps they were part of the development that led to it. Although the nature of social stratification has changed in the post-war decades, it still seems to be the most British of all uncomfortable “certainties” that impacts on questions of identity. In light of these processes, the question of how black and Asian writers assess identity and Britishness is inevitably complex, and needs to be viewed from multiple perspectives. The issue opens with Mike Phillips’s position paper “Postcolonial Endgame”, in which he traces the evolution and changing context of black and Asian writing in Britain, and places

Approaching space: Zadie Smith’s North London fiction

Abstract This article traces Zadie Smith’s recurring, but shifting, engagement with North London in her works White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and The Embassy of Cambodia. It argues that underlying Smith’s changing aesthetic approaches to this particular space is an ethical agenda: an emphasis on the necessity to engage critically and responsibly with space (which Doreen Massey has read as a social construction that impacts powerfully on individuals and groups). After a consideration of the different approaches to, and functions of, North London in Smith’s first three novels, it focuses on her structural and metanarrative engagement with space in her more recent works. This gives way to reflections on agency, in light of the social determination of concrete spaces. Whereas Smith set out to create in White Teeth a representation of a quintessentially British space, it is what Massey refers to as a “global sense of space” – one that shapes national discourses – that manifests itself in her more recent literary North London.AbstractThis article traces Zadie Smith’s recurring, but shifting, engagement with North London in her works White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and The Embassy of Cambodia. It argues that underlying Smith’s changing aesthetic approaches to this particular space is an ethical agenda: an emphasis on the necessity to engage critically and responsibly with space (which Doreen Massey has read as a social construction that impacts powerfully on individuals and groups). After a consideration of the different approaches to, and functions of, North London in Smith’s first three novels, it focuses on her structural and metanarrative engagement with space in her more recent works. This gives way to reflections on agency, in light of the social determination of concrete spaces. Whereas Smith set out to create in White Teeth a representation of a quintessentially British space, it is what Massey refers to as a “global sense of space” – one that shapes national discourses – that manifests itself in her more ...

“Selling the Caribbean: An Introduction”

Abstract Taking the cue from the widespread metaphorical use of economic concepts such as resources or markets in both sociolinguistics and cultural studies, the present introduction sets out to discuss more literal aspects of the financial value of languages and the economy of the literary marketplace in the – mostly ‘Anglophone’ – Caribbean. Globalization, in particular a globally operating media and entertainment industry, and increased mobility – both in the shape of migration from the Caribbean and tourism into the region – have led to the widespread commodification of the region’s natural, linguistic, and cultural resources. These developments have shaken up the traditional colonial and early post-colonial order but ushered in new inequalities. This introduction and the present special issue of ZAA explore the potential and dangers of this state of affairs from a cross-disciplinary perspective, bringing together approaches from (socio)linguistics, literary, and cultural studies.

‘They saw our people dressed up and they just … escaped!’ Mark Wallis in interview about the development of professional live history in Britain

This contribution is an annotated interview with Mark Wallis, founder and director of the UKs most established professional live history company. Its main purpose is to provide insights into the practice of first-person interpretation and to explore the potential of this practice for historical understanding. Beyond this, it has a particular interest in the way in which professional live historians address ethical questions that inevitably arise in every serious attempt to re-present the past.