Textual Transformations in Contemporary Black Writing in Britain

Abstract

While the first wave of Caribbean immigrant writers brilliantly explored race-related issues, black Britons like Andrea Levy, Zadie Smith and Caryl Phillips, among others, have sought to depart from earlier fiction, motivated in their project by the changing white face of Britain. In this article, I would like to argue that cultural change in Britain has deeply influenced literary production and has, consequently, laid the ground for a series of textual transformations. To capture instances of creative excess in contemporary black writing in Britain, I will bring under examination Caryl Phillips’s (2009) novel In the Falling Snow. My intention is to show to what extent Phillips’s work surpasses the ‘noose of race’ and already-familiar representations of multicultural Britain to celebrate a ‘post-racial’ society.