„Man Moses, you are still living in the Dark Ages! You don’t even know that we have created a Black Literature, that it have writers who write some powerful books what making the whole world realize our existence and our struggle.”

(Sam Selvon, Moses Ascending, 1975: 43)

For well over two centuries now, black and Asian authors have written and published in the British Isles – effectively changing the face of English literature beyond recognition. The lecture course surveys this extensive and varied body of black and Asian British writing, introducing students to texts such as Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789), Mary Prince’s History (1831), Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures (1857), Cornelia Sorabji’s India Calling (1934), Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956), Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), and Bernardine Evaristo’s Mr Loverman (2013). These texts not only forge links across time and space, drawing upon and creating connections between Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the UK. Increasingly, the sense of a literary tradition and a cultural history emerges, with texts referring back to earlier writing; such dialogues will be observed in terms of form, thematics, and language. This lecture explores the cultural locations of these texts; it invites reflection on critical terminology such as ”black British” and ”British Asian”, situating cultural production in British, postcolonial, diasporic, transnational, and translocal contexts. For some sessions, reading samples or audio-visual material to be discussed in the lecture will be made available via learnweb.

Diverse Voices, New Directions (Berlin)

Kurs im HIS-LSF