V. S. Naipaul and George Lamming at the BBC: Reconsidering the Windrush Generation's Political Art

Abstract:This article reconsiders V. S. Naipaul's cultural politics by attending to his work with the BBC in the middle decades of the twentieth century, particularly alongside the midcentury political argument of George Lamming. Because of Naipaul's skepticism of Caribbean autonomy in his later life, critics have overlooked his anticolonial and antiracist critique in the midcentury. This elision has led to a simplification of the Windrush generation's cultural politics. Scholars of these writers often paint Naipaul and Lamming as political opposites; this essay instead draws parallels between their emphases on the development of a Caribbean literary tradition. Through extensive archival work, including the examination of a heretofore unexplored Third Programme discussion, this article sheds new light on the multifarious ways that Windrush writers worked out their mutual desire for aesthetic and cultural autonomy for Caribbean writers.