34 - Redefining the Boundaries

Summary

Little is commonly said about sexuality in black and Asian British creative production, although diverse and often contradictory expressions of non-normative desire are easily traced throughout the twentieth century in the writing of, among others, McKay, Dawes, and Naipaul as well as Kureishi, Smartt, and Agbabi. Ranging across various literary forms to look at writers such as Kei Miller, Bernadine Evaristo, Diriye Osman, Neel Mukherjee, Thomas Glave, Jay Bernard, and Adam Lowe, this chapter raises questions about the interrogation, blurring, and translation of racial and sexual identities across a range of orientations and generations. It examines how texts have redefined and questioned the powerful stereotypes surrounding representations of black and Asian bodies, sexualities, and gendered identities. In so doing, it charts the uneven evolution and heterogeneous quality of queer black writing, framing it against Stuart Hall’s ‘refusal to represent the black experience in Britain as monolithic, self-contained, sexually stabilised and always “right on”’.