Histories of West Indian writing have traditionally put particular focus on the migration of a group of writers often labelled in shorthand as the Windrush generation, after the 1948 arrival of the Empire Windrush that began the post-World War II arrival of large amounts of Caribbean people in Britain. Finding opportunities in the British literary scene – most notably, with the BBC’s Caribbean Voices programme – these migrant writers were able to establish themselves, promote each other, and reach a wide audience, even as their encounter with British racism intensified their anticolonial vision. These writers’ experience was frequently refracted through the idea of exile, which in the Caribbean critical imaginary came to define the writers of the period. This chapter takes up an examination of this remarkably prolific and influential generation of anglophone Caribbean writers, with particular focus on the extent to which exile is an adequate concept for thinking about their writing. It discusses the different levels of geographical and cultural identification with which these writers grappled, remarking the process by which interacting with Caribbean people from throughout the region in Britain helped foster a West Indian cultural identity beyond any single island, as well as the tension between regionalism and localized nationalism that resulted. Going further, it will also illustrate the sense of an emergent ‘rooting’ of the Caribbean in Britain, a process that was self-consciously addressed in the writing of many of these authors and subsequently formalized in the formation of alternative publishing and cultural institutions in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. The chapter provides readings of works by Kamau Brathwaite, George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul, Andrew Salkey, and Samuel Selvon, and puts them into context with the much larger population of less celebrated writers, as well as Caribbean literary figures who came to England before the post-World War II period of mass migration. In illustrating the complexity of the Windrush writers’ engagements with notions of home, citizenship, belonging, and cultural ownership, the essay argues that a more fluid, multi-directional understanding of the concept of exile is necessary in order for the era’s important contributions, not just to the project of anticolonial nationalism, but also to the nascent discourses of diaspora and black Britishness, to be properly understood.

Scholars such as Ian Smith, Jennifer Rahim, Nadia Ellis, Kezia Page, Rosamond King, and Timothy Chin have debunked the idea that sex and sexuality were either peripheral to or absent from the concerns of writers of the 1920s to 1970s. An examination of the sociocultural and literary-discursive mores that may have shaped the codes by which writers and critics addressed sexual issues enables an important re-evaluation of the relationship between literary works and the politics of respectability and heteronormativity often associated with the anglophone Caribbean. This examination attends to treatments of sex and sexuality that engage with nationalism, social status, queer desire, and cultural identity, and considers whether, how, and why the literary representations shifted at different points during this period and among different language traditions.

During the early twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Anglo-Caribbean workers migrated to Spanish-speaking countries, but intellectual exchanges between the region’s anglophone and hispanophone writers remained few and far between. This situation changed above all as a result of the Cuban Revolution, which captured the imagination of a generation of writers and catalysed new networks through institutions like Casa de las Américas. These exchanges would be dominated by concerns with race and sovereignty, while sidestepping questions about Cuban communism and literary censorship. When Andrew Salkey attended the 1968 Cultural Congress in Havana with C. L. R. James and John La Rose, he portrayed Cuba as a symbol of regional anti-imperialism and interrogated the condition of Afro-Cubans, overlooking contemporary censorship scandals. The cross-Caribbean itineraries of Nicolás Guillén and Edward Kamau Brathwaite in the 1970s are emblematic of the cultural diplomacy of the time period. While Guillén’s reception foregrounded his writing on people of African descent and downplayed his commitment to communism, Brathwaite’s poetry was celebrated in Cuba but also subject to suspicion for its black radical content.