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It was a chance encounter, the Trinidadian, Sam Selvon and the Barbadian, George Lamming, on the boat from Trinidad to Britain. Two young, unknown writers, indistinguishable (as George Lamming recalled) from all the other ‘ordinary’ young men and women immigrating to Britain at that time, all coming ‘to look for a better break… in search of an expectation’. 1 When
Caribbean migration to Britain brought many new things—new music, new foods, new styles. It brought new ways of thinking too. This book explores the intellectual ideas that the West Indians brought with them to Britain. It shows that, for more than a century, West Indians living in Britain developed a dazzling intellectual critique of the codes of Imperial Britain. Chapters discuss the influence of, amongst others, C. L. R. James, Una Marson, George Lamming, Jean Rhys, Claude McKay and V. S. Naipaul. The contributors draw from many different disciplines to bring alive the thought and personalities of the figures they discuss, providing a picture of intellectual developments in Britain from which we can still learn much. The introduction argues that the recovery of this Caribbean past, on the home territory of Britain itself, reveals much about the prospects of multiracial Britain.
in Commonwealth countries, and full rights to settlement in Britain. Attracted by better prospects in ‘the mother country’, many West Indians took up the offer. The arrivals were temporarily housed in the Clapham South shelter in south-west London less than a mile away from Cold Harbour Lane in Brixton where they registered and sought employment. This period has received important attention in such novels as George Lamming's The Emigrants ( 1954 ), Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners ( 1956 ) and Caryl Phillips's The Final Passage ( 1985
négritude are significant in this respect. So too, as Mary Chamberlain establishes, was George Lamming’s entry in the middle 1950s into the Parisian intellectual milieu which brought together Sartrean phenomenology and négritude – from which so much contemporary thinking on ‘the fact of blackness’ has subsequently derived. Insofar as French philosophy touched the intellectual culture of the British in
/periphery relationship: the relationship between London and the Caribbean. 22 Swanzy was quick to employ readers on the programme such as Sam Selvon from Trinidad, Pauline Henriques from Jamaica, George Lamming from Barbados, and other London-based, Caribbean writers and artists. Indeed, his critical sense of the uniqueness of an emergent Caribbean
dislocations and make speakable the unspeakable. Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners marks the comprehensive inauguration of this sub-genre of the West Indian novel, and in so doing, invented a new diasporic realism. 29 ‘Poetry’, according to George Lamming, ‘is a way of listening.’ 30 The West Indian emigrants who travelled to the metropole – familiar strangers, simultaneously
belonging to the landscape; disassociation, in fact, of art from the act of living’. 4 This bifurcation has been a constant theme of black intellectuals and writers. George Lamming expressed the predicament using language as both a metaphor of subjugation and a literal expression of Caribbean colonisation. ‘Prospero’, he wrote, ‘lives in the absolute certainty that Language which is his gift to Caliban is
, a hyphenated sense, the African-Caribbean’s home. ‘The Caribbean’, George Lamming suggests, ‘may be defined as the continuum of a journey in space and consciousness.’ 22 Or as Stuart Hall has pointed out, ‘The Caribbean is already the diaspora of Africa, Europe, China, Asia, India, and this diaspora re-diasporized itself [in Britain]’. 23 And as he reflects on his own migration: ‘I am
Lamming in The Pleasures of Exile had called the ‘phenomenon’ of postwar Caribbean literature in English 7 was well under way. Samuel Selvon’s A Brighter Sun (1952), George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin (1953), Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock (1960), V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas (1960) and Derek Walcott
author of fiction . As my book South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain shows, the demarcation of the role of writers of colour as native informants constrained to non - fiction has a long history in white-dominated publishing. The situation was especially difficult for mid-century South Asian anglophone fictional writers. There was no equivalent of the pioneering BBC Radio programme Caribbean Voices that provided a platform, financial reward and critical appraisal for fledgling Caribbean novelists Sam Selvon, V.S. Naipaul and George Lamming. In any