Introduction

Abstract

T. S. Eliot wrote, in the 1920s, that the newest literary works entering a canon do not merely tack themselves onto the end of it, but in fact reconfigure the very essence of that canon, transforming the present sense of its historical past and of its literary traditions. The validity of Eliot’s insight is unassailable—if ironic, given the fact that Eliot, like the black British writers we discuss in this volume, was an immigrant to Britain from a former colony—a poet and critic who assimilated himself into the British literary canon as the very embodiment of Britishness and who helped through his critical exertions to define a British literary canon that became even more arcane, classicist, royalist, and selective than it had been before. Today, we learn that Benjamin Zephaniah—the Birmingham-born black poet, writer, actor, and presenter—has just turned down the honorific O.B.E. (Order of the British Empire), for which Eliot would have groveled. Eliot might even have been opposed to the Queen’s offer to Zephaniah in the first place, for, in his “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot certainly did not propose to let just anyone into the literary parlor. Such historical twists and turns remind us of the about-face that followed the arrival in England of the Windrush generation. Britain opened the door to the Empire, but certainly did not expect the colonials to come, to stay, and to expect the same life that the Anglo-Saxons themselves enjoyed.