This chapter discusses changing conceptions of national identity as Britain entered its postcolonial phase after World War II. Structured around key moments like the attempt to reconfigure the Empire as a ’Commonwealth of Nations’, the famed 1948 arrival of the Empire Windrush with migrants from the Caribbean and the various citizenship laws passed in the wake of increasing migration from Britain’s colonial holdings, the chapter examines the work of writers who became part of the new communities settling into Britain during the post-war period. Pioneering authors E. R. Braithwaite, George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul and Sam Selvon are considered, as well as their literary inheritors, including Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jackie Kay, Hari Kunzru, Andrea Levy, Kamala Markandaya, Caryl Phillips and Benjamin Zephaniah. Ultimately, the chapter reveals how literature has both registered and assertively renegotiated the still incomplete evolution towards a more ecumenical sense of Britishness.

Although characterized by generational shifts in terms of articulating cultural affiliations and attachments to both the Caribbean and Britain, Caribbean British writing remains deeply marked by issues of un/belonging. This essay explores this embedded thematic across changing political contexts and reads the transitions in Caribbean British literature that have brought different revisionary perspectives on literary forms and languages, post-Windrush British history and the much deeper historical connections between the Caribbean presence and the UK. As well as contesting racism, these works articulate intersectional identities informed by class, gender and sexuality as it is experienced within and across the UK and the Caribbean. Given that contemporary Caribbean British literature is very much connected with Caribbean literature and that of the larger diaspora, this essay considers the modes of critical attention necessary to engage with its new forms and platforms.

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.

Following active labour recruitment in the Caribbean, postwar Britain was not only unprepared, offering hastily equipped air raid shelters to her colonial citizens, but also quite unwilling to welcome its new arrivants. In the slew of novels from the 1950s and 1960s, dislocated men (predominantly) have relocated to the ‘mother country’ but find themselves in effect doubly displaced, halfway between their origins and their destination. Sam Selvon’s ‘boys’ are groping through thick London fog in search of the imperial romance that the metropolis had seemed to promise. The protagonists of his Moses trilogy struggle to survive by inhabiting enclosed spaces, leading a subterranean room-based existence. They represent this first migrant generation’s embattled quest, both literal and metaphorical, to be accommodated in Britain. This chapter focuses on how the works of various writers of different backgrounds and political persuasions – including Braithwaite, Desani, Lamming, Markandaya, Naipaul, Salkey, and Selvon – engage with Britain as an inhospitable nation, anticipating through their fictions later debates on the location of culture and the power of writing the centre from the margins.