Conclusion
Summary
This study has endeavoured to explore through readings of ten recent novels by black British and British Asian writers how antiracism has determined the form and content of both political debate and individual minority identities in Britain. Antiracism refers to a broad range of discrete activities, behaviours, and attitudes which contest discriminatory practices based on racial or religious difference. Many of these facets have long histories and exist in their present forms only because of the many decades of struggle that have made them possible. The dominant mode of antiracism in Britain continues to be multiculturalism, even if it has been increasingly contested in recent years. Multiculturalism itself is a problematic term, with multiple and often conflicting meanings, but it perhaps remains ‘the only available ideology that has taken diversity seriously’. It is valid to question whether this respect for diversity can on its own challenge the many material bases and forms of racial discrimination, but few antiracists accept that its ideals could profitably be abandoned altogether.
Nonetheless, each of the writers examined here has a very different relationship to antiracism, and to its current mode of multiculturalism. In charting three particular flashpoints through which to explore antiracist identity (the diasporic longing for an African homeland, the otherness of Muslim Britons, and the reification of ethnicity into fixed communal structures), I certainly do not wish to suggest that these are the only crucibles in which antiracism is tested, nor that the writers themselves can easily be homogenized, or seen to have the same relation to the issues.
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- Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2010