Gender and Racial Others in Post-war Britain

Caryl Phillips, the respected black British Caribbean novelist and political essayist, argued in 2004 that most white British writers of fiction and drama of the 1950s and early 1960s ignored questions of race and the growing presence in the UK of new migrants from the colonies and the Commonwealth. Even where the newcomers were acknowledged, it was difficult, according to Phillips, for a white English writer to engage imaginatively with a black character, particularly male, without 'thinking sexually'. This article suggests that black people were not as absent from the white cultural landscape as Phillips claimed, nor as narrowly depicted. It investigates the different ways men and women as authors represented racial alterity in the literary and cinematic texts of the period and argues that sexual thinking tended to be more a product of the male imagination than the white imagination during those years.

Citation:
Mica, N. (2006) 'Gender and Racial Others in Postwar Britain' Third Text, 20 (6) 671 — 682.