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This is a complex, multilayered work that brings together two Irish priests, a journalist who is a frequenter of prostitutes, a Hindu shopkeeper and a Dickensian array of minor characters in an exploration of sexual squalor and spiritual redemption.
'This illuminating, vivid volume is a fitting tribute to the experiences of migration' - Hanif Kureishi Between the arrival of the HMT Empire Windrush in 1948 and the passing of the 1971 Immigration Act, half a million people came to the UK from the Caribbean. In the aftermath of the 2018 Windrush Scandal, the story of the Windrush Generation is more widely known than ever. But is it the whole story? Through a series of biographical essays, poems and articles, The Other Windrush shines a light on the hidden history of a 'minority within a minority': Caribbean migrants of Indian and Chinese descent - often the descendants of indentured labourers - who were the 'invisible passengers' of the Windrush generation. Both highlighting the diversity of their lives and cultural backgrounds, and delving into the largely forgotten history of the system of indenture in the British Caribbean, The Other Windrush makes a unique addition to the literature on migration and the British Empire.
'This illuminating, vivid volume is a fitting tribute to the experiences of migration' - Hanif Kureishi Between the arrival of the HMT Empire Windrush in 1948 and the passing of the 1971 Immigration Act, half a million people came to the UK from the Caribbean. In the aftermath of the 2018 Windrush Scandal, the story of the Windrush Generation is more widely known than ever. But is it the whole story? Through a series of biographical essays, poems and articles, The Other Windrush shines a light on the hidden history of a 'minority within a minority': Caribbean migrants of Indian and Chinese descent - often the descendants of indentured labourers - who were the 'invisible passengers' of the Windrush generation. Both highlighting the diversity of their lives and cultural backgrounds, and delving into the largely forgotten history of the system of indenture in the British Caribbean, The Other Windrush makes a unique addition to the literature on migration and the British Empire.
Most writers associated with the first generation of British Romanticism - Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, Thelwall, and others - wrote against the slave trade. This edition collects a corpus of work which reflects the issues and theories concerning slavery and the status of the slave.
The young narrator of "The Intended" is twelve when he leaves his village in rural Guyana to come to England. There, he is abandoned into social care, but with great determination and self-discipline seizes every opportunity to follow his aunt's farewell advice, 'but you must take education...pass plenty exam' and wins a scholarship to Oxford. With an upper-class white fiancee, he has unquestionably arrived, but at the cost of ignoring the other part of his aunt's farewell: '...you is we, remember you is we.' Through remembering his Guyanese childhood and youth in working class Balham, the narrator's older self explores the contradictions, the difficulties implicit in his aunt's advice and the cost to his personality of losing that past. At one level a moving semi-autobiographical novel, "The Intended" is also a sophisticated postcolonial text with its echoes of 'Heart of Darkness', its play between language registers and its exploration of the instability of identity. As an Indo-Guyanese, the narrator finds himself seen as 'Paki' by the English, and as some mongrel hybrid by 'real' Asians from India and Pakistan; as sharing a common British 'Blackness', yet acutely conscious of the real cultural divisions between Guyanese of African and Indian origins.
A young Afro-Guyanese engineer comes to a coastal Kentish village as part of a project to shore up its sea-defences. He boards with an old English woman, Mrs Rutherford, and through his relationship with her discovers the latent violence and raw emotions present in this apparently placid village. He discovers, too, that underlying the village's essential Englishness, echoes of the imperial past resound. In the process, he is forced to reconsider his perceptions of himself and his native Guyana, and in particular to question his engineer's certainties in the primacy of the empirical and the rational. This is a richly intertextual novel which uses reference to the novels of Conrad, Wilson Harris and V.S. Naipaul's 'The Enigma of Arrival' to set up a multi-layered dialogue concerning the nature of Englishness, the legacy of Empire and different perspectives on the nature of history and reality.
"Slave Song" is unquestionably one of the most important collections of Caribbean/Black British poetry to have been published in the last twenty years. On its first publication in 1984 it won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and established Dabydeen as a provocative and paradigm-shifting writer. At the heart of "Slave Song" are the voices of African slaves and Indian labourers expressing, in a Guyanese Creole that is as far removed from Standard English as it is possible to get, their songs of defiance, of a thwarted erotic energy. But surrounding this harsh and lyrical core of Creole expression is an elaborate critical apparatus of translations (which deliberately reveal the actual untranslatability of the Creole) and a parody of the kind of critical commentary that does no more than paraphrase or at best contextualise the original poem. It took some time for the displaced critics to recognise that this prosaic apparatus was as much part of the meaning of the whole as the poems themselves, that Dabydeen was engaged in a play of masks, an expression of his own duality and a critique of the relationship which is at the core of Caribbean writing: that between the articulate writer and the supposedly voiceless workers and peasants. This new edition has an afterword by David Dabydeen that briefly explores his response to these poems after more than twenty years.
Set in the nineteenth century, "The Counting House" narrates the experiences of an Indian couple, Rohinia and Vidia, growing up and getting married in a small Indian village before setting off for a new life in colonial Guyana, seduced by tales of the promised land and the riches they will find there. However, instead of fertile fields and instant wealth they find they have been sold into slavery. Having abandoned their families, their culture, and a country that seems increasingly like a paradise, Rohini and Vidia learn how to live with themselves, whose hopes end in tragedy. The story illuminates historical tensions between indentured Indian workers and Guyanese of African descent.
A collection of essays, poems and prose by leading Indo-Caribbean scholars and writers on East Indian history and culture in the Caribbean.
The Oxford Companion to Black British History is an essential
reference for anyone who wants to understand the long and
fascinating history of black people in Britain from classical times
to the present day. It brings together a unique collection of
articles that provide an overview of the black presence in Britain,
and the rich and diverse contribution made to British society. The
A-Z guide includes entries for landmark figures, key events,
concepts (such as Emancipation and Reparations), and historical
accounts. Subject areas include medicine, military history, art,
music, sports, and education. Entries range from the African
auxiliaries stationed on Hadrian's Wall in the second century A.D.,
through John Edmonstone, who taught taxidermy to Charles Darwin,
Mary Seacole, the "Black Florence Nightingale," and Walter Tull, a
professional soccer player and First World War officer. The guide
will be of tremendous interest to those involved in commenting on
subjects relating to the Black British community, or anyone
interested in finding out about the history of expatriated Africans
outside the Americas.
Extracts from the work of 19 Afro-British, Black American, and Caribbean writers who spent time in Britain during the period. They are drawn from autobiographies, slave narratives, unpublished letters, oral accounts, and public records. Includes a general introduction and an introduction to each writer.
A HARLOT'S PROGRESS reinvents William Hogarth's famous painting of 1732 which tells the story of a whore, a Jewish merchant, a magistrateand a quack doctor bound together by sexual and financial greed. Dabydeen's novel endows Hogarth's characters with alternative potential lives, redeeming them for their cliched status as predators or victims. The protagonist - in Hogarth, a black slave boy, in Dabydeen, London's oldest black inhabitant - is forced to tell his story to the Abolitionists in return for their charity. He refuses however to supply parade of grievances, and to give a simplistic account of beatings, sexual abuses, etc. He will not embark upon yet another fictional journey into the dark nature of slavery for the voyeuristic delight of the English reader. Instead, the old man ties the reader up in knots as deftly as a harlot her client: he spins a tale of myths, half-truths and fantasies; recreating Africa and eighteenth-century London in startlingly poetic ways. What matters to him is the odyssey into poetry, the rich texture of his narrative, notits truthfulness. In this, his fourth novel, David Dabydeen opens up history to myriad imaginary interpretations, repopulating a vanished world with a strange, defiantly vivid and compassionate humanity.
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