Key point 1

The history of Black and Asian British writing goes back to the 18th century. Writers like Olaudah Equiano, Ignatius Sancho and Sake Dean Mahomed played on their multiple identities and captured a sense of being adjacent to Britain while highlighting the permeability of Britain’s borders.

Key point 2

Although there are many parallels between Black writing in the US and in Britain, one key difference in Black and Asian British writing is the issue of citizenship.

Key point 3

Black and Asian British writing has typically been left out of the British literary tradition because the orthodoxies of the British canon have not perceived it to be a part of British writing.

Four centuries of history

One of the interesting things about the long history of Black and Asian British writing is that it goes back as far as the 18th century. It covers over four centuries. It’s remarkable that Britain has this long history of Black and Asian settlement, because quite often there’s a significant amnesia about this history. Many people believe that the history of Black and Asian British writing began after World War Two during the period of mass migration following the docking of the HMT Empire Windrush, which was a trooper ship that travelled from the Caribbean to Britain, supposedly bringing the first groups of West Indian migrants.

HMS Empire Windrush. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Some of the earliest contributors to this writing were freed slaves who wrote autobiographies and were living in London. One in particular, Olaudah Equiano, wrote an autobiography, which was published in 1789. This book went into at least 15 different editions and several European translations. He was one of the first writers to inscribe not only the experiences of the transatlantic slave trade, but also the experience of being in London, which he saw as a form of refuge from the world that he had come from.

There were many others at the time. Another writer, Ignatius Sancho, lived in Greenwich and had a long correspondence with Laurence Sterne. Sancho, interestingly, talked about his relationship to Britain as being ‘that of a lodger and only that’ – a trope that Hanif Kureishi picks up in the 20th century when he opens his famous novel The Buddha of Suburbia with ‘My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost.’ This sense of being adjacent to English culture, being adjacent to Britain, runs right through from the 18th century to the present day.

Playing on different identities

Also writing in the 18th century, and few people know about this, was a writer called Sake Dean Mahomed. Like Equiano and Sancho, he played on various identities; all these writers played on multiple versions of themselves. Mahomed, who travelled from India to Ireland and was involved with a captain in the East India Company, wrote his story, The Travels of Dean Mahomet, which was the first Indian novel in English.

A view of the business premises, in Brighton, of Sake Dean Mahomed. 1826. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Mahomed married an Irish woman in Cork and then later became the Shampooing Surgeon for George IV, in Brighton. In the images that remain of him in the archives, you have on the one hand this exoticised and orientalised Eastern man, known as an Asiatic. On the other hand, he presents himself as the Shampooing Surgeon and as a Victorian gentleman. These writers play on these roles, and these preoccupations stay with the history right up to the present day.

There were women writers as well. In the 19th century, you have Mary Seacole, and there were also a whole number of escaped and liberated slaves from the US who came to Britain and wrote about Britain and performed in various music halls, trying to persuade people during the period of emancipation to support the liberation in the US. Two of these were a couple, William and Ellen Craft. She dressed up as a white Southern gentleman because she was fair-skinned, and he acted as her slave. They used that disguise to escape from the States and then performed that within Britain. A lot of their writings, rather like those by Equiano, Sancho and Mahomed, point to the permeability of Britain’s borders; the fact that this small island nation existed in a much, much larger geography.

The issue of citizenship in Britain

The writing between Blacks in America and in Britain has many parallels. Obviously, there are issues of race, issues of ethnicity, issues of liberation. But as we move into the period of Empire within Britain, things are quite different, because the British Empire covered many countries geographically – two-thirds of the world, as we’re often told. When we’re talking about Black America, or African American America, the transatlantic slave trade had quite a different history, linked to a very specific moment.

During the period of Empire, you had writers from Asia, the Caribbean, Africa and many, many countries arriving in Britain. One of the key issues that is different, and which runs right through all the literature, is the whole question of citizenship. Once the US had reached a stage where the slaves were liberated, there was never really a question about their citizenship. They might have been seen as second-class citizens, but they weren’t really questioned as Americans, whereas in Britain, this issue of citizenship remained key and remains key today.

The emancipation of the British West Indies. Plate entitled "To the friends of Negro Emancipation", celebrating the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Left out of the national literary tradition

The reason why Black and Asian British writing has been left out is because the orthodoxies of the British canon have not perceived it to be a part of British writing. And one reason it hasn’t been perceived to be a part of British writing is because many of these writers have double allegiances, so it was easy not to fully include them. They are both Caribbean and British; they’re African and British; they’re Asian and British. They may have Caribbean, African and Asian allegiances, but they are all colonials. And because of the Empire, they continue to have not just a close, but an intimate relationship with Britain.

Ironically, when the so-called British canon was formed – influenced by Matthew Arnold and ideas of order, cohesion, nation and home – the British actually tried it out in India first. They did this in order to try and convince the “natives” to understand good decency, the values of civilisation and civility and the ethics of British thinking. That literature was then transported to British universities, and the literature syllabus was formed after it had been tried out in India.

Reclaiming forgotten histories

In very recent years, there’s been an attempt to reclaim those histories. As a result of the Black Lives Matter movement, for example, we have been encouraged both in Britain and in the US to look at Black histories. In the post-war period in Britain, the first move was to try to incorporate these writings as “Commonwealth writings”, or “Caribbean writings”, or “South Asian writings” and so on. More recently – and this term has been used retrospectively, so it’s a kind of history in the making – the term Black and Asian British writing has been used to make it part of British writing, rather than adjacent to it.

This idea of the naming of the writing is important in the sense that Black and Asian is a very large umbrella for many different and plural constituencies. If one writes a history of Black and Asian British writing, one inevitably is dealing with these very complex and multiple constituencies and histories and relationships to Britain. There’s no attempt in naming something Black and Asian to restrict it to a container. In fact, it’s a porous container that speaks across many different cultures.

What’s in a name?

Would another name be more appropriate? I don’t think it matters how you name Black and Asian British writing – whether you name it as migrant, whether you name it as immigrant – because whatever you do, you end up with a literature that’s supposedly adjacent to or added onto what’s perceived as mainstream British writing. In an ideal world, one should not need to name anything. Black and Asian British writing should just simply be incorporated as British writing. I would hope in the next 20 years we get to that point.

There are problems right now in even combining the terms Black and Asian, because while they share similar histories and have productive alliances, they are also very, very distinct in their histories and their cultures. Black writing often stems from an Afro-Caribbean heritage. South Asian writing stems from the subcontinent. Yet, due to their particular history and their relationship to Empire in Britain, I think it’s useful to see them collectively as a form of autobiography of the nation.

Right now, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement, we’re being encouraged not to include South Asian with Black writers, and I can understand all the reasons for that. Yet, Britain’s particular history combined the anti-racist movements of all these communities, where Black was used as a political label, as well as one that defined specific cultural heritage.

The need to acknowledge this writing today

One of the crucial reasons why we need to acknowledge Britain’s Black and Asian literary traditions is that they’ve been written out of history. There are virtually no literary and cultural histories that cover this material. I’ve just edited a Cambridge history of Black and Asian British writing, and it’s the first history of Black and Asian British writing that’s been put together which covers this continuum of work, which stretches from the 18th century to the present.

If people don’t know this history, they continue to assume that Britain has not been inscribed in any way by its Black and Asian populations – that these people weren’t creating culture, weren’t creating art – and this was just simply a new form of writing. That newness, in a sense, has been a real problem in terms of the assessment of this long history.

Discover more about

Black and Asian British writing

Nasta, S., & Stein, M. (Eds.). (2020). The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing. Cambridge University Press.

Nasta, S. (Ed.). (2019). Brave New Words: The Power of Writing Now. Myriad.

Nasta, S. (Ed.). (2004). Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk. Routledge.

The long line of Black and Asian British literature