This chapter engages with the formal and thematic reclamation of the past, writing and re-writing of history, and construction of individual and communal genealogies from ancestral to present-day locations in black and Asian British narrative. This comprises adoptions and adaptions of the US–American tradition of the neo-slave narrative (including those by Phillips, Warner, Gilroy, D’Aguiar, and Dabydeen). Revisiting the birth of the Indian nation, her independence from Britain, and the subcontinent’s partition, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children not only offers a magical realist approach to the writing of history, it also explores the very limits of historiography. Historiographical fiction, including many of Caryl Phillips’s works, Smith’s White Teeth, and works by Gurnah, Gilroy, Levy, S. I. Martin and also Marina Warner, absorb, cite, contest, and recirculate a wide archive of pre-texts that range from the colonial to the postcolonial (from Phillips’s Shakespeare to Martin’s Equiano) and comprise various sources which are retrieved, transcoded, and repossessed.
