As heart of empire, London was ‘home’ to a number of colonial writers and intellectuals from across the globe. Key figures in the history of black and Asian British writing such as activist George Padmore, the polymath novelist, dramatist, and political philosopher C. L. R. James, the poet, broadcaster, and dramatist, Una Marson, and a number of South Asians including Cedric Dover, Sajjad Zaheer, M. J. Tambimuttu, and Mulk Raj Anand were active also as public intellectuals in a wide range of political organisations and cultural networks including the Pan-African movement, the League of Coloured Peoples (1931), and the Progressive Writers Association (1935). This chapter outlines the histories, interrelationships, and connections across these distinct British-based political and cultural networks; it explores their objectives and demonstrates how their presence in Britain began to generate a number of parallel creative and political projects. These networks were to become of increasing significance in the formation of anti-colonial resistance and political movements in the period prior to Independence and decolonisation after World War II, connecting a number of these major literary figures.

This introduction discusses the conceptual and theoretical framework of The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing, explaining the rationale behind its both linear and lateral structure as well as the selection of its contents. Flagging the difficulties of attempting to contain and articulate such an extensive, variegated, and still emerging field within ‘one’ history, it points to the complex historical and cultural pathways that have conditioned how the different strands of black and Asian writing have evolved. Written to provide readers with a cultural compass to map the often unstable political and historical contexts by which these literatures have variously been framed and named, it points to significant markers and milestones, contiguities and contingencies, which characterise the four centuries of black and Asian writing that this volume covers. One of the challenges of creating such a retrospective history has been to look both backwards and forwards, creating new literary vistas from what have often been limited critical frameworks and reductive political contextualisations.

In 1945, the English fiction-writer V. S. Pritchett made a telling comment on the ‘disappearance’ of his friend, Mulk Raj Anand. Anand, well known as founding father of the Indian novel in English, had been living in London for over twenty years. A public intellectual and vociferous anti-imperialist, he was active in many different areas of cultural life. Yet, as Pritchett says, reflecting on Anand's sudden departure for India at the end of the war, ‘He vanished…there seems to have been a long silence.’ That silence was partly the silence of war. Before 1939, Britain was an imperial nation, still confident, despite building colonial resistance, of its global role. After 1945, its horizons swiftly began to shift inwards to an island nation, keen to ‘screen out’ the awkward consequences of its declining empire from its field of vision. Pritchett would certainly have been aware of the changing landscape of a blitz-torn nation, struggling, despite victory, to cope with the changed economic, political and social realities of the post-war world. The ‘silence’ intimated here, however, was primarily a cultural one: what Stuart Hall was later to call a ‘profound historical forgetfulness’ or wilful ‘amnesia’, that has continued for decades in accounts of British history. Although this gap in the cultural historiography of the nation has now begun to be addressed by a post-1990s generation of scholars keen to thicken the ‘lines’ of the ‘black in the Union Jack’, there remains a general failure to recognise the extent to which the map of English literature has always been forged from its mixed colonial past.

Britain has had a heterogeneous migrant population for well over 400 years, correspondent to its empire abroad, making the imperial centre as much the ‘home’ of the colonial encounter as were the colonies themselves, situated on the so-called peripheries. As W. E. B. Du Bois noted in 1911, not only was the ‘Empire’ a ‘coloured’ empire but the streets of London were increasingly revealing ‘this fact’. The more visible presence of several generations of African, Caribbean and Asian ‘immigrants’ in the decades after World War II was not simply an effect of the residue of empire (‘you are here because we were there’) but the culmination of a long and more intimate relationship.

The period immediately following World War II is now well known for the migration to the United Kingdom of a large number of writers and artists from a fast-declining empire. Lured to the once-imperial metropolis to find publishers and a wider audience for their work, many were to have a major impact on the face of British writing as the century progressed. Yet, few attempts were made to include them in post-war accounts of British literary history. Moreover, the pigeonholes that were eventually set up either excluded them on grounds of race, placing them neatly in separate national traditions, or partially assimilated them as the ‘exotic’ flowers of what came by the 1960s to be known as ‘Commonwealth Literature’: a so-called wave of ‘new’ writings in English from previously colonised areas but which were frequently reduced by well-meaning liberal critics to simply derivative or mimicking branches of the main. There were, of course, several reasons for this. Not only had the critical temper of British writing become narrowly parochial (with a loss of interest in the cosmopolitanism characteristic of the Modernist movement earlier in the century), but it was still fuelled, even after Independence, by the lingering ideologies of a three-hundred-year imperial history, the divisive legacies of a manichean colonialist discourse which failed to accept that the formation of the nation was not only built on the culture of empire but also created by it. Domestic ideas of the national character had always been buoyed up by a process of exclusion, where what was British was defined in contradistinction to those it regarded to be the nation’s ‘others’, whether at home or abroad.