From Chaucer to Shakespeare, and Virginia Woolf to Bernadine Evaristo, London as a city has always instigated the literary imagination. By the nineteenth century, it had become not just the capital of the United Kingdom, but also of a sprawling world-wide empire. This also meant that the city became host to a diverse range of stories, storytellers, and writers that have responded to both its physical and imagined dimensions. Taking a cue from Pascale Casanova’sThe World Republic of Letters, but correcting it to account for the impact of empire, this essay tracks the ways in which London emerged as the global centre of literary and aesthetic production and as a universal arbiter of taste in the early decades of the twentieth century, through the decades of decolonization in the middle of the twentieth century, and leading up to the contemporary moment in which its status as a literary capital is subject to new uncertainties that are enmeshed in the political economy of contemporary world literature.The essay focalizes this discussion through two linked tropes—the city’s “exhibitionary complex” and its “circulatory network”.

In the mid twentieth century, writers such as V. S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon, Ismith Khan, and Peter Kempadoo produced stories and novels that were often received and understood in terms of the nationalist writing of the period. At the same time, their work represented in important ways Indo-Caribbean experiences that often complicated narratives of the nation and drew attention to tensions mapped onto perceived ethnic differences, such as those examined in Selvon’s lecture ‘Three Into One Can’t Go – East Indian, Trinidadian, West Indian’. Looking at the first published novels of Kempadoo, Naipaul, Selvon, and Khan, this chapter assesses the ways in which these writers represent the spatial, racial, and classed complexities of establishing one’s identity as an Indo-Caribbean man in the post-slavery and post-indentureship spaces of Guyana and Trinidad. Comparing the authors’ various approaches to themes of gender relations, belonging, cross-racial relations, and shifting class identity in both local and global contexts, the chapter lays out the unique and unsettled nature of Indo-Caribbean masculinity in the mid twentieth century. By pulling back the lens to focus on four Indo-Caribbean writers’ explorations of masculinity in their first novels, the chapter also provides a context and counter to the global dominance of V. S. Naipaul’s depictions of this subject position.

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.