This essay describes Bernardine Evaristo as exemplary of a cohort of contemporary writers who are self-consciously pushing the boundaries of content and form to amplify the voices and perspectives of marginalized persons. Laying out in a systematic way the features and goals of the multifocal decolonial novel, this article takes Evaristo’s Booker Prize–winning novel Girl, Woman, Other (2019) as a case study. We show that Evaristo uses a multifocal narrrative structure to distribute narrative attention and character space more or less equally among a large number of characters, even as she pays careful attention to the characters’ networks of interaction and affiliation. Such a narrative structure demonstrates that there are always multiple “worlds of sense” – or domains of intelligibility – that make up a shared social-natural world; they further effectively illustrate the ecological and interconnected nature of that world. In this way, multifocal narrative novels provincialize the so-called universal perspective without falling into epistemological or ontological relativism. Through the use of a multifocal narrative structure and the poetic technique of caesura, Evaristo deploys the resources of literary fiction to document an obscured Black British historical past while harnessing the imagination to reshape an understanding of that past.

The newest addition to the pantheon of Crimean worthies is the Caribbean healer and hotelier Mary Seacole, who ministered to the troops at the war front. In 1857, Seacole released her autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. The book was an effort to safeguard her livelihood and secure her place in Crimean history. The latter goal was realized with the rediscovery of the autobiography in the later twentieth century. Black British activists and health care providers found an inspiration in Seacole’s story, sharing it in their communities and building on its legacy. By the millennium, their labors had transformed Seacole into a national icon, with a place in the National Curriculum and the National Gallery. A magisterial statue of Seacole now stands on the South Bank of the Thames, where Florence Nightingale spearheaded efforts in nursing education. Touted in the past as the “Black Nightingale,” Seacole was another unconventional woman with a long legacy. Yet, she is a Crimean protagonist in her own right, known for warmth, humor, and ingenuity. An embodiment of distinctive virtues, Seacole has become a Crimean role model for the twenty-first century.

As is well known, London became an important literary headquarters for a number of now major literary figures who migrated to Britain after World War II from the Caribbean; many of these were to become formative in the evolution of a black British canon. Whilst the presence of these artists in the metropolis of London has commonly been linked to a literary renaissance which began to transform the parameters of the ‘English’ novel, less attention has been paid to how the bi-focal vision of writers such as Edgar Mittelholzer, Wilson Harris, V. S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon, and George Lamming not only articulated a wider-angled vision of modernity but posited alternative metropolitan imaginaries and aesthetics. Focusing primarily on fiction, this essay demonstrates how the respective and distinct experimentations of these writers with form and voice began to reshape the cultural and literary map of the nation, at the same time interrogating its narrow (and often parochial) borders.

This chapter attends to how the use of ‘black’ as a political aesthetic but contested signifier developed throughout the1970s and 1980s, and impacted on literary production. Partly due to such literary and political alliances, pioneering works such as the first ‘black British’ poetry collection, News for Babylon (1984), ground-breaking anthologies of women’s voices such as Watchers and Seekers (1987) or E. A. Markham’s 1989 selection of black and Caribbean poetry, Hinterland, appeared. The voices of new collectives such as the Asian Women’s Writers, Tara Arts or the Southall Black Sisters were published in the 1980s alongside periodicals like Artrage and Wasafiri which began to embed and inscribe black and Asian literary and artistic culture into Britain. This chapter explores the cultural and political landscape of this formative period and charts how these key literary and cultural initiatives opened up the borders of British writing. Discussing the difficult relations between arts sponsorship, policy-making, and creativity, the chapter explores how various pigeon-holes, whether of race, multiculturalism, or cultural diversity have at times limited understanding and serious critical appreciations of the range of black and Asian creative practice.