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Preface
In 1978 I started teaching a subject which was known at the time as “Commonwealth literature” and is better known nowadays as “postcolonial literatures”. The novelists on the reading lists at the University of Leeds included Attia Hosain, whose book Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) recounts the vicissitudes of a landed family in Lucknow in the 1930s, the breakup of the feudal order before new political ideas, the gathering forces against British rule, and increasing signs of the tensions which will lead to Partition; Kamala Markandaya, whose book The Nowhere Man (1972) examines, ahead of its time, the bitter realities of being in diaspora—racist violence, racial discrimination, cultural differences, and conflict between generations of the same family; and V. S. Naipaul, whose book The Mimic Men (1967) is an incisive rendering of the psychological predicament of the colonial, out of place both in the colony and the metropolis. Migrating to England at different times, for different reasons, and burdened with problems of belonging, would these writers, I wonder, have identified themselves and their works as “Commonwealth”, “postcolonial”, “Black British”, or “British Asian”?