Book contents
- The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing
- The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I New Formations
- Part II Uneven Histories
- Part III Writing the Contemporary
- (I) Looking Back, Looking Forward
- 26 Diasporic Translocations
- 27 Reinventing the Nation
- 28 Reclaiming the Past
- 29 Expanding Realism, Thinking New Worlds
- 30 Writing Lives, Inventing Selves
- 31 Black and Asian British Women’s Poetry
- (II) Framing New Visions
- Select Bibliography
- Index
28 - Reclaiming the Past
Black and Asian British Genealogies
from (I) - Looking Back, Looking Forward
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 December 2019
- The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing
- The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I New Formations
- Part II Uneven Histories
- Part III Writing the Contemporary
- (I) Looking Back, Looking Forward
- 26 Diasporic Translocations
- 27 Reinventing the Nation
- 28 Reclaiming the Past
- 29 Expanding Realism, Thinking New Worlds
- 30 Writing Lives, Inventing Selves
- 31 Black and Asian British Women’s Poetry
- (II) Framing New Visions
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter engages with the formal and thematic reclamation of the past, writing and re-writing of history, and construction of individual and communal genealogies from ancestral to present-day locations in black and Asian British narrative. This comprises adoptions and adaptions of the US–American tradition of the neo-slave narrative (including those by Phillips, Warner, Gilroy, D’Aguiar, and Dabydeen). Revisiting the birth of the Indian nation, her independence from Britain, and the subcontinent’s partition, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children not only offers a magical realist approach to the writing of history, it also explores the very limits of historiography. Historiographical fiction, including many of Caryl Phillips’s works, Smith’s White Teeth, and works by Gurnah, Gilroy, Levy, S. I. Martin and also Marina Warner, absorb, cite, contest, and recirculate a wide archive of pre-texts that range from the colonial to the postcolonial (from Phillips’s Shakespeare to Martin’s Equiano) and comprise various sources which are retrieved, transcoded, and repossessed.
- Type
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- Information
- The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing , pp. 468 - 484Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020