24 - Forging Connections

Summary

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.