21 - Narratives of Survival

Summary

Opening up and drawing attention to what Kobena Mercer has called ‘the referential realities of race’, in postwar Britain many writers turned (perhaps like their eighteenth-century forebears) towards autobiography, testimony, and realist forms to contest racism and impact dominant sites of representation. Whether Braithwaite in Paid Servant (1962), Markandaya in The Nowhere Man (1972), Emecheta in her autobiographical fictions such as In the Ditch (1972) and Second Class Citizen (1974), Dhondy in his 1970s East End short stories, Gilroy in her memoir Black Teacher (1976), or Riley’s The Unbelonging (1985), these writers document and articulate the harsh conditions of black and Asian existence in postwar Britain. Using hindsight to link what might at first appear to be a disparate series of texts published between 1960 and the mid-1980s, this chapter highlights how thematic, contextual, and stylistic correspondences emerge across a wide range of different writers whose fictions became partially determined by the need to make evident the grim realities of the widespread culture of institutional and interpersonal racism which continued to face black and Asian people and communities in Britain.