LITMIR.BIZ

      Introduction

      Oladipo Agboluaje belongs arguably to the third generation or category of playwrights of African and British heritage¹ whose dramaturgies differ from the writings of first- and second-generation writers of African and Asian descents; the latter’s subjects and dramatic styles were shaped and defined primarily by their experiences of colonialism. The works of first-generation writers (poets, novelists and playwrights of mixed African and British heritage in Britain from the late 1930s to the early 1960s were characterised by nostalgia and an interest in pre-colonial histories and cultures broken and fragmented by colonialism. Among these were Jamaican-born poet James Berry, Andrew Salkey and Stuart Hall, Edward Kamau Braithwaite, Wilson Harris, and Edgar Mettleholzer of Guyana, Samuel Selvon, CLR James, and VS Naipaul of Trinidad, and Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka of Nigeria. These writers were non-pretentious about their cultural agendas as they set about de-mystifying, explaining, re-interpreting and validating the cultural experiences of pre-colonial societies, their histories and myths. Some of their subjects and themes, although designed to provide readers with authentic representations of pre-colonised cultures, were overtly anti-colonial in sentiments and played on cultural binaries. Others, motivated by a sense of social responsibility and drawn by compulsion to explain the cultures of indigenous societies, produced writings that sought to contest the misrepresentations perpetrated and perpetuated in colonial histories written mostly from the viewpoints of colonial administrators and anthropologists.

      Their successors, the second-generation writers among whom are Caryl Churchill, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Buchi Emecheta, Mustapha Mutura, Edgar White, Caryl Phillips, and Hanif Kureishi, set upon a different course, that of retrieving and re-writing pre-colonial, colonial, migrant, and dislocation experiences using the linguistic and narrative tropes of erstwhile colonisers as well as the hybridized languages they produced. Their works conveyed a radical and ideological fervour that was both essential in the development of post-colonialism as a literary and later subsequently as a multidisciplinary, multi-reading framework for analysing the political, social, economic, and literary developments of postcolonial societies. Second-generation writers of African and Asian descents include those born during colonialism and their countries’ struggles for independence and those born in the immediate aftermaths of political independence. The Marxist radicalism espoused in some of the writings by second-generation authors of dual heritage is motivated by factors such as the ideological impetus and social activism of their predecessors, resisting cultural hegemonies and homogenisation of their experiences. Another important factor is their rejection of other and marginal² as critical categories for describing their historical experiences in relation to mainstream white society. Their impacts on the literary scene produced a polyglot of writings on new subjectivities and relationships and generated a distinctively British multi-narrative framed by Britain’s former colonial enterprise.

      Although Black British writing (I’m using the term here in a very broad sense) started with social awakening and occasional apologetics by first-generation writers, second-generation writers resented the second-class citizenship bestowed on non-white communities in Britain. Second-generation writers confronted their marginalisation with bold assertions of their rights of being and inclusion. Some of the changes in writing styles were accomplished through a combination of abrasive self-determinism and cultural radicalisms that Alex Sierz (2001) would describe later as ‘in-yer-face’. These approaches and the contributions of social and sociological theorists such as Edward Said (1991) (on Orientalism) and James Stuart Hall (1993) (on Cultural Identity and Diaspora) to mention just a few, inevitably expanded the literary space and subjects of work by writers of African and Asian descents in Britain. Their writings went from them-us, centre-margin and dominant-other binaries to an exploration of postcolonial and postmodern conditions, from social tensions and sub-cultures to resisting racial hegemonies and essentialisms as well as interrogating gender, ideology, identity, sexuality, migration and diaspora, etc from several perspectives.

      By the late 1990s postcolonialism and postmodernism changed and expanded the literary space in Britain and globally. Debates continue as to whether postmodernism has rendered postcolonialism ‘posthistoric’ in which case, the stage of human history it ‘claimed to offer explanation and understanding’ (Breisach, 2003:10) for has ended. Edward Said (1993) regards postmodernism’s claims to a post-history era as another hegemonic instrument designed by the West for global dominance. Existentialism and human conditions, sociocultural relations between individuals and people groups, societal and inter- and intra-community tensions, diaspora concerns and geopolitics are

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