1 The inadequacies of “postcolonial” models in the analysis of black British literatures are discussed in Lars Ole Sauerberg, Intercultural Voices in Contemporary British Literature: The Implosion of Empire, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2001, and Mike Phillips, London Crossings: A Biography of Black Britain, London and New York: Continuum, 2001.

2 Stephen Howe, “Transnationalisms Good, Bad, Imagined, Thick and Thin”, Interventions, 4,1 (2002), 77-88 (88).

3 Caryl Phillips, A Distant Shore, London: Secker and Warburg, 2003.

4 John McLeod, “Some Problems with ‘British’ in a ‘Black British Canon’ ”, Wasafiri, 36 (2002), 56-9.

5 This can clearly be seen in the four “homes” of the United States, Africa, the Caribbean, and Britain that are explored in Phillips’s essay collection A New World Order, London: Secker and Warburg, 2001.

6 McLeod, “Some Problems with ‘British’ in a ‘Black British Canon’ ”, 58.

7 John McLeod, “A Night at ‘The Cosmopolitan’: Axes of Transnational Encounter in the 1930s and 1940s”, Interventions, 4,1 (2002), 53-67 (59).

8 Kwame Dawes, “Negotiating the Ship on the Head: Black British Fiction”, Wasafiri, 29 (1999), 18-24; Mark Stein, “Cultures of Hybridity: Reading Black British Literature”, Kunapipi, 20 (1998), 76-89; Benedicte Ledent, Caryl Phillips, Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2002.

9 James Procter, Dwelling Places: Postwar Black British Writing, Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2002.

10 This idea has been elaborated through the use of the slightly ugly neologism “nationalitarianism”: “a (global) struggle for socialist internationalism, but one centred (locally) on the terrain of the nation”, Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1999, p.139.

11 Paul Gilroy, ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation, London: Hutchinson, 1987.

12 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London and New York: Verso, 1993, p. 80.

13 See Paul Gilroy, Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures, London: Serpent’s Tail: 1993, pp. 120-45.

14 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, p. 133.

15 Laura Chrisman, “Journeying to Death; Gilroy’s Black Atlantic”, Race and Class, 39, 2 (1997), 51-64 (55).

16 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, p. 15.

17 ibid., p.7.

18 ibid., p. 19.

19 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford: OUP, 1977, p. 119

20 ibid.

21 ibid., p. 112.

22 Of course, this in itself does not excuse the absence of international and cross-cultural traditions in the work of Williams, which Gilroy is right to criticize.

23 Chrisman, “Journeying to Death”, 55.

24 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, pp. 4, 28.

25 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, London: Athlone, 1988, p. 25.

26 Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby, Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.

27 Floya Anthias and Nina Yuval-Davis, Racialised Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour, Class and Anti-Racist Struggle, London: Routledge, 1993, p.22.

28 Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism: II. The Nation-State and Violence, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985, p. 119.

29 The definitive account of the congress is Hakim Adi and Marika Sherwood, The 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress Revisited: with Colonial and Coloured Unity (the Report of the 5th Pan-African Congress), London: New Beacon Books, 1995. All of the details I provide are taken from this volume.

30 Linton Kwesi Johnson, “Di Great Insohreckshan” [1984] in Mi Revalue-shanary Fren: Selected Poems, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002, p. 60.

31 Linton Kwesi Johnson, Making History, 1984. Mango CCD 9770.

32 The Brixton Disorders 10-12 April 1981: Report of an Inquiry by Lord Scarman, London: HMSO, 1981, p. 16.

33 “Interview with Linton Kwesi Johnson” in Hinterland: Caribbean Poetry from the West Indies and Britain, ed. E. A. Markham, Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1989, pp. 250-61 (pp. 259-60).

34 An alternative strategy used to attack the commonplace view of Sangatte can be found in Phillips’s reportage, for which he clandestinely entered the camp where “[j]ournalists are not allowed” in order to give a fair picture of the men and women inside, Caryl Phillips, “Strangers in a Strange Land”, The Guardian, 21 November 2001.

35 Slavoj Zizek, “Parallax”, London Review of Books, 20 November 2003, p.24.

36 Phillips, A Distant Shore, p.3.

37 Procter, Dwelling Places, p. 166. It is interesting to note the similarities between Solomon’s death and the murder of David Oluwale in 1970s Leeds where Phillips was raised. Each victim was beaten and thrown in a canal. Phillips takes this defining moment of British urban racism (the policemen who killed Oluwale were acquitted of manslaughter) and transposes it onto the rural scene - in so doing he denies the distinction between the city and country which resonates through much British thought on the nation and especially on the location of racial difference and racism.

38 ibid., p. 134.

39 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, London: Viking, 1988, p. 343.

40 Phillips, A Distant Shore, p.4.

41 ibid., pp. 9-10.

Anti-Racism,the Nation-State and Contemporary Black British Literature

Abstract