Anti-Racism, the Nation-State and Contemporary Black British Literature

In this paper I am concerned to address some of the ways in which contemporary black British literature has been located in relation to a national framework. I do not want to deny that this literature can be seen to illuminate identities that have their roots in international traditions and global cultural forms. However, I wish to take issue with the apparent reluctance among literary critics in this area to accept the use of the nation as an explanatory tool in analysing these works. It is my contention that an understanding of any material anti-racist politics articulated in these texts can only be achieved when placed within the context of the actual discursive practices of the state and civil society of the nation at any given time. I intend to address some of the problems attached to the increasingly popular analytic model of the transnational. While this model may be seen to provide a way of discussing the specificity of individual nations in a way that other conceptions of globalization or postcolonialism fail to achieve, in practice one can frequently still detect a failure to assert fully the materiality of the national space to the degree that a viable conception of transnationality would seem to require. To demonstrate the need for an idea of the nation when analysing anti-racism in black writing in Britain, I intend to present a critique of one of the most influential non-national analyses of black identity: Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic. In showing how this model may not be able to explain particular instances of anti-racist discourse, I hope to present a case in which the importance of the nation-state to expressions of anti-racist