18 - Looking Beyond, Shifting the Gaze

Summary

Black and Asian British writing can be formalised as diaspora literatures with links to ancestral homelands on the subcontinent, in Africa, and in the Caribbean; interrogations of and inscriptions on a matrix of British cultures are another thematic and aesthetic concern of black and Asian British writing. Beyond this familiar framework, though, a range of writers roam more widely, exploring different pathways: V. S. Naipaul’s interest in Africa or North America is a case in point, as are Caryl Phillips’s European travelogues, or Shiva Naipaul’s travel writing, and his essays collected in Unfinished Journey (1986). Bernardine Evaristo’s Lara explores her Brazilian, Nigerian, Irish, and German ancestry, whilst Andrew Salkey recounts his travels to Guyana in Georgetown Journal (1972) and celebrates placelessness in his Anancy Traveller (1992). This chapter thus focuses on writing which does not give primacy to the exploration of ancestral or postcolonial origins, but reaches out beyond this well-established binary framework of homes past and present.