Abstract
My name is Mike Phillips and Iām a novelist among other things. You may not know that I am a United Kingdom citizen, and you may not know that I do not think of myself as a Caribbean writer, or an African writer, or an African American writer, or a diasporic writer, or even as a writer with an ambiguous stance somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic. No such luck. I think of myself as an English writer, and all of this seems simple enough, except that I also think of myself (and I often describe myself) as a black British writer. In this last persona, however, I am perpetually and consistently confronted by a specific difficulty, which is to do with a perceived disjunction between who I am and my identity as a writer. I want to point to the nature of the difficulty by quoting you an email I received recently from a woman, who described herself as being of Jamaican/Scottish parentage, and who was writing a PhD, which she described as
largely devoted to a discussion of issues for mixed race people in this country not least the historic invisibility, and the pressure to identify as a single, specific race that tends to come from people outside of the experience of being racially mixed.
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Notes
Mike Phillips, Blood Rights (London: Michael Joseph, 1989).
Sukdhev Sandhu, London Calling: Descriptions of the English Metropolis by African, Caribbean and South Asian Writers, 1772ā1998 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Sandhu, op. cit., p. 301.
For example of Phillipsā and Kureishiās work see Caryl Phillips, The Final Passage (London: Faber, 1984)
and Hanif Kureishi, The Budda of Surburbia (London: Faber, 1990)
and My beatitiful Laundrette (London: Faber, 1984)
Among Andrea Levyās writings are Every Light in the House Burninā London: Headline Review, 1994)
and Fruit of the Lemon (London: Headline Review, 1999)
Among Ferdinand Dennis works are: The Sleepless Summer (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989)
and Duppy Conqueror (London: Flamingo, 1998)
Works from these authors for further reading might include: Courttia Newland, The Scholar: A West Side Story (London: Abacus, 1998)
Alex Wheatle, Brixton Rock (London: BlackAmber Books, 1999)
and East of Acre Lane (London: HarperCollins, 2002)
Anton Marks, Bushman (London: The X Press, 2004)
Mike Gayle, My Legendary Girlfriend (London: Flame, 1998)
and Turning Thirty (London: Flame, 2000)
and Nicola Williams Without Prejudice (London: St Martinās Press, 1998).
Tabish Khair, āLaeserens foedsel ā og doed,ā Information, 25 November 2004, p. 12.
Diran Adebayo, Some Kind of Black (London: Virago, 1996), p. 47.
Gayatri Spivak, āWho Claims Alterity?,ā in Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariana (eds), Remaking History (Seattle: Bay Press, 1989), pp. 269ā92; p. 275.
For a discussion of V.S. Naipaul, see Bruce King, V.S. Naipaul (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993).
See Bruce King, āThe Internationalization of English Literatureā, The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. 13, 1948ā2000. pp. 125ā40.
Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips, Windrush: The Irrestistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (London: HarperCollins, 1998).
Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness (London: Dent & Sons Ltd, 1902).
Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).
Henk de Berg, Freudās Theory and its Uses in Literary and Cultural Studies: An Introduction (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003).
T.S. Eliot, āThe Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrockā, in Collected Poems 1909ā1962 (London: Faber, 1974), p. 13.
W.B. Yeats, āThe Second Comingā, in Selected Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1974), p. 99.
James Joyce, Finneganās Wake (London: Faber, 1939), p. 103.
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (St Albans: Triad Books, 1977), p. 172.
Spivak, op. cit., P. 275.
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Phillips, M. (2006). Foreword: Migration, Modernity and English Writing ā Reflections on Migrant Identity and Canon Formation. In: Low, G., Wynne-Davies, M. (eds) A Black British Canon?. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230625693_2
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