Abstract Chapter 5 considers a staple of overseas broadcasting, which presented ‘word pictures’ of Britain ‘at work and play’ from the oblique points of view of its late colonial residents. Combining the genres of travel writing, ethnography, and literary fiction, the thousands of scripts that these eye-witness formats yielded between the outbreak of the Second World War and the late-1960s constitute one of the most remarkable records of Britain during the critical decades of imperial decline, and mass migration to the metropole. Aired to listeners in the West Indies and West Africa, the vast majority were never heard by home audiences. By eavesdropping on these external transmissions, this chapter seeks to reintroduce their insistent narratives of cross-cultural encounter to the domestic cultural history of mid-century Britain, from postwar reconstruction and the Festival of Britain (1951), to the rapid rise of immigration following the Queen’s Coronation (1953), and the aftermath of the Notting Hill riots (1958). Focusing on the ‘ways of seeing’ and forms of ‘local colour’ developed by figures including A. E. T. Henry, Stuart Hall, George Lamming, and Chinua Achebe, it examines how writers responded to the implosion of empire in real time. As the BBC’s early imperial mission of metropolitan projection became, in the hands of overseas broadcasters, subject to forms of cultural translation, the corporation’s own unambiguous distinctions between Home and Overseas Services were drawn into question.

Abstract Scripting Empire recovers the cultural history of West Indian and West African writing at the BBC in order to rethink the critical mid-century decades of decolonization, late modernism, and mass migration to the metropole. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, a remarkable group of black Atlantic artists and intellectuals became broadcasters, producers, editors, and scriptwriters at the corporation. They included Una Marson, Langston Hughes, Louise Bennett, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, George Lamming Amos Tutuola, V. S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon, Cyprian Ekwensi, Stuart Hall, and C. L. R. James. Operating at the interface of a range of literary and broadcast genres, this loose network of writers and thinkers prompt a reassessment of aesthetic innovation and political imagination between the outbreak of World War II and the first airings of post-colonial independence. Moving beyond prevailing accounts of the novel, and narratives of extension, this book examines the role of short, serial formats and episodic structures within the vibrant economy of mid-century literary production. Focusing on the BBC as both a modernist institution and a mass medium, Scripting Empire works comparatively across dozens of different programmes spanning the Colonial Service, General Overseas Service, Home Service, Light Programme, and Third Programme. The book draws upon a transnational archive of materials including scripts, correspondence, periodicals, visual records, and sound recordings in order to reposition the cultural contribution of West Indians and West Africans within a more pervasive and porous account of radio transmission, the legacy of which extends well beyond broadcasting.

Abstract At the mid-century, West Indian and West African authors circulated their work both locally and transnationally across a staggering range of venues, from commercial magazines and wireless periodicals, to the sporadic and relatively obscure literary reviews. What connects these episodic settings are the economies of what this chapter terms ‘the short space’. Sandwiched between adverts, essays, and artwork, compressed into the carefully measured inches of magazines, locked into the pre-set layouts of newspapers, and the strict time limits of broadcasting, these platforms presented writers with a remarkably similar narrative footprint, the narrow margins of which fit the short form like a glove. This chapter recalibrates mid-century literary production in relation to the tightly bound, enveloped venues towards which so many writers gravitated during these decades. Focusing on key practitioners including Cyprian Ekwensi, V. S. Naipaul, and Sam Selvon, it argues the short space still has a great deal to teach us about the material and aesthetic conditions of literary activity after the war. Rather than extending prevailing accounts of literary networks and circuits, it suggests the multiple ways in which writers short-circuited or deviated from the presumed destinations and directions of travel associated with their work, while confounding distinctions between high and popular forms.

It is perhaps no longer enough to talk about the role of history in post-war Black British literature. The gradual emergence of historical subjects within this writing over the last sixty years itself needs to be historicised. The canon of the 1950s is characterised by novels and short stories unfolding in the present. Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Ways of Sunlight (1957), E. R. Braithwaite's To Sir With Love (1959), George Lamming's The Emigrants (1954) and Andrew Salkey's Escape to an Autumn Pavement (1960) are all published in early post-war London, and set in early post-war London. The same is true of the 1960s and 1970s: Beryl Gilroy's Black Teacher (1976), Buchi Emecheta's In the Ditch (1972) and Second-Class Citizen (1974), Farrukh Dhondy's short-story collections East End at Your Feet (1976) and Come to Mecca (1978), and Linton Kwesi Johnson's poems Dread Beat and Blood (1975) are all works that capture with dramatic immediacy the pressing political period in which they were published. History is certainly not absent from this period of writing, whether as the modernist nightmare evoked in the epigraph to Lamming's The Pleasures of Exile (1960) – 'History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake (James Joyce)' – or as wistful 'oldtalk' in Selvon's The Lonely Londoners. Nevertheless, from the 1970s on it is possible to speak of a distinct historical turn in Black British and British Asian literature. The 1980s and 1990s in particular saw a proliferation of texts dealing with the history of slavery, a subject that was relatively neglected within Black British writing until that point. Many of these texts might be said to evoke what Stuart Hall has called 'the outside history that is inside the history of the English', stories that unfold largely overseas but that are constitutive of the British past. Since the 1990s, writers have also focused increasingly on the 'internal' history of post-1945 black settlement to the extent that we could now reconstruct a domestic story of the post-war British past through its historical representation in Black literature. World War II forms a focal point in Dennis Ferdinand's Duppy Conqueror (1998), Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2001) and Andrea Levy's Small Island (2004).

White Teeth, Brick Lane and Small Island come to our readers humming with meanings derived from the marketplace. Zadie Smith has been dentified as 'the perfect package for a literary marketing exercise' (Squires, 2007: 179), with 'demographics at her fingertips'. Two years later Monica Ali was dubbed 'a new Zadie Smith' (Lane, 2003: np), while in 2005 the conspicuous success of Andrea Levy's novel made it 'tempting' for a Guardian newspaper reviewer 'to see Small Island as this year's White Teeth' (Allardice, 2005: np). The same reviewer goes on to explain that '[l]ike Monica Ali or Zadie Smith, Levy, the daughter of first-generation immigrants, "a bastard child of the empire"? draws on growing up with a dual cultural heritage'. The reviewer's quotation ('a bastard child of the empire') comes from Salman Rushdie, the celebrity author who famously endorsed Smith's debut on the front cover as a novel with 'bite'. Bite, a term that suggests both a certain narrative astringency and that the text is somehow al dente, or perfectly cooked for consumption, later became a buzzword to describe a whole host of contemporary novels, including Small Island: 'Levy's simple, measured prose is capable of delivering quite a bite' (Tripney, 2005: np).

Combining sustained empirical analysis of reading group conversations with four case studies of classic and contemporary novels: Things Fall Apart, White Teeth, Brick Lane and Small Island, this book

Across our chapters we have explored how a specific community of ‘lay’ readers (book groups) have oriented to a series of preoccupations in reading the same handful of literary texts. The often remarkable consistency with which groups in different parts of the globe read these texts through the lens of their particular locality, aligned themselves to the values of realism and displayed a canny, sometimes cynical, engagement with the processes of the literary marketplace, testifies to the status of book groups as a socially constituted ‘community of practice’. In Chapter 2 we introduced the concept of the community of practice: a group of people coming together around a shared interest, set of knowledge and a common endeavour, and whose membership is often indexed through particular repeated practices and behaviours, including verbal ones. Yet the precise social functions of this community of readers have been, for the most part, implicit in the previous chapters.1 In this final chapter, through attention to the details of the situated talk of book groups, we make these functions more explicit.

This essay focuses on the Jamaican poet, dramatist, and broadcaster Una Marson (1905–65) and her turbulent career at the BBC between 1939 and 1946. Drawing on a range of unpublished archival sources, including files recently vetted and released for research since the publication of Delia Jarrett-Macauley's authoritative biography of Marson in 1998, the essay has two primary aims. First, to recover in greater detail and in more holistic terms than has previously been possible the personal story of Marson's professional relationships at the corporation. Second, to pursue what the director of Empire Services described as the “jealousies,” “dissentions,” and “rivalry” that Marson's appointment provoked during a relatively neglected period of black metropolitan cultural production in the early 1940s.

We begin this chapter with a series of discrepant responses to the end of Monica Ali's novel. To briefly locate these readings within what Alastair Cormack (above) calls the 'developmental narrative of realism': in the preceding pages, the protagonist Nazneen has been led blindfold through the streets of London on a surprise all-female outing to the skating rink. At this point Nazneen has left her husband and her lover, along with the domestic drudgery of a high rise flat in London's Tower Hamlets. As the narrative progresses Nazneen has steadily taken control of her own destiny (fate), exploring the London beyond her claustrophobic flat, starting work in the garment industry, having an affair with a local activist (Karim), and by the end of the novel freeing herself from the marital home and setting up her own business in Brick Lane.

This chapter considers a series of novels that were either written during what K.D.M. Snell identifies as the boom decades of the 1970s and 1980s, or otherwise return to that period within works of historical fiction. It focuses on the first novels of two authors closely associated with the north of England: David Peace's Nineteen Seventy Four and Pat Barker's Union Street. The chapter refers at points to the wider series of regional novels associated with these authors: Peace's 'Red Riding Quartet' and Barker's Blow Your House Down. It attempts to understand the recurring but textually unelaborated, or 'unpacked', relations between empire, violence, race and region within these novels. Empire appears on one level inconsequential to their fictional worlds. In their north of England narratives, a spade is a spade, and race and empire are surface events rather than moments of profound revelation or epiphany.