The New York Times Magazine ran a special on London for its 4 March 2012 edition. It highlighted how the city faced a crucial moment in the ongoing creation, recreation and retelling of its history. The city was coming to terms with the austerity measures put in place by its Conservative-Liberal coalition government while being just months away from hosting the Olympics, the thirtieth of the modern era, which was returning to England’s capital after a period of sixty-four years.[1] This feature carried the title ‘True Londoners Are Extinct’, its central ideas being that the true Londoner does not exist, that so many of the city’s inhabitants have roots elsewhere and that the United Kingdom’s capital is represented by a conflation of cultures and a convergence of ideas. Of course this is not a newly posited argument, as for years countless journalists, cultural critics and scholars among others have described London as the cosmopolitan melting pot, fused by its multicultural participants. So when the author of the New York Times feature, Craig Taylor, went on to state:

London in 2012, like most other global cities, is in significant flux, much less beholden to sepia-tinged notions of what it used to be and much more a product of its new arrivals (23)

he was almost echoing the likes of Sukhdev Sandhu who, in writing about how authors imagined London, describes all cities as being ‘temporary places’, where ‘people, ideas, fashions, businesses, buildings, come and go in the blink of an eye’ (Sandhu 275).

In his book, London Calling, Sandhu recognises that there has been and there remains a literary tradition, a succession of writers of colour who have depicted the experience of new black and Asian arrivals to the city of London. Works range from the ‘cool cynicism’ of Moses Aloetta, the Trinidadian e ́migre ́ at the heart of Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, to the disappointments experienced by Ralph Singh, an exile in London and narrator of V S Naipaul’s The Mimic Men. For the most part, these and many early novels written by writers of colour carried similar themes, touching on the horrors newly arrived immigrants faced, challenges that included racial abuse, harsh living conditions and the difficulty of securing employment. Buchi Emecheta borrowed heavily from her own experiences as a young single mother in 1970s London for her novel In The Ditch, documenting her problems through the vehicle of her protagonist Adah; while Peter Fryer’s comprehensive history of black people in Britain, Staying Power, dedicates chapters to outlining the disadvantages black people faced in London during the same decade, from housing shortages to police brutality and the subsequent emergence of political resistance (see Fryer chapters 11 and 12).

Later, in capturing both his own anger and frustration and that of a generation of immigrants around the inner city community of Brixton, south London and their like, dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson turned the notion of the immigrant as a silent victim on its head. He spat back, asserting that ‘Inglan was a bitch’ through powerfully charged lyrics inspired, in part, by the American black political movement.

London became a place where the notion of ‘belonging’ was vigorously contested in the work of black writers. Racial politics and the space people of colour occupied in the city grew from discursive deconstructions of oppression to interrogations on notions of identity, nationalism, nation formation and more. Sukdev Sandhu cites the emergence of writer Hanif Kureshi as an important moment in the history of black and Asian writers’ depiction of the city. Kureshi, Sandhu asserts, anticipates and enables a ‘reverence for the fallen city [London]’ and, he goes on,

He [Kureshi] helped to show that inner London was by no means the dismal, darkest Africa that sensationalistic Tory writers claimed. He also taught second-generation Asians who were ashamed at the crumbling environments in which they lived and who thought of their double or triple identities as a form of tragic schizophrenia a crucial lesson. That lesson was this: good can come of fracture and brokenness . . . Kureshi also made London a viable terrain for Asian and black writers to exploit. (270)

Critical attention to Kureshi’s work emerged in the 1990s, stemming from a preceding decade described by R Victoria Arana as being pivotal in a re-fashioning of British identity, a time where ‘a new confidence was being felt’ and ‘black writers were laying out contestatory visions of their new homelands’ (245v). Two decades on and John McLeod, in his book Postcolonial London Rewriting the Metropolis, detects a ‘millennial optimism’ in the work of a particular crop of writers of colour emerging in the early part of the twenty-first century, arguing that Zadie Smith’s White Teeth presents a London ‘in which the depressingly familial social conflicts of the previous decade are no longer primarily determining the formation of character and fortunes of plot’ (161). He speaks of the work of David Dabydeen, Fred D’Aguiar and Bernardine Evaristo as ‘pointing to new possibilities and modes of transformation at the beginning of the new millennium’ (162).

And so it is through these new visions, the optimism and new possibilities, that we fast-forward to 2013 and to a London that seemingly has, at least culturally if nothing else, undergone a transformation over the last fifty years, arriving at its pinnacle — the 2012 London Olympics and the celebratory display of its inclusion, racial and cultural tolerance depicted in its opening and closing ceremonies and the two-and-a-half week techni-coloured spectacle in between. And yet, in the midst of all the optimism, there remain novels which caution us to be vigilant, to beware the facile championing of multiculturalism, often exemplified through the perceived achievements of British culture. This ‘new’ British culture no longer has a single set of cultural identifiers attached to it, but is instead one embellished by the global success of films like Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham or Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth, as well as the achievements of visual artists such as Anish Kapoor or Yinka Shonibare, the mainstream embrace of rappers like Dizzie Rascal or, to return to the Olympics, the UK’s gold medal-winning athletes Mo Farah and Jessica Ennis — the former of Somali descent and the latter of Jamaican and English parentage. These are just a few who belong to a list too supernumerary for me to name here, but what emerged through the milieu and cultural iconography was a dyadic Britain, one with ideas of difference and tolerance at its crust, yet at its core demarcated by notions of national values entrenched in its imperial history. Homi K Bhaba takes a similar position, arguing that the sign of the ‘civilised’ or ‘cultured’ attitude is fostered on the ‘ability to appreciate cultures in a kind of musée imaginaire; as though one should be able to collect and appreciate them’ (in Rutherford 208). He goes on to add that cultural diversity becomes a bedrock of multi-cultural educational policy in Britain but, at the same time, there is a ‘containment’ of it:

A transparent norm is constituted, a norm given by the host society or dominant culture, which says that ‘these cultures are fine, but we must be able to locate them within our own grid’. (ibid)

The flag-bearer of this dyadic Britain, of its ‘cool heterogeneity’ and the fashionable embrace of others is, of course, its capital city London. It is a city in flux, yet entrenched in a state which Paul Gilroy describes as ‘conviviality’, the ‘processes of cohabitation and interaction that have made multi-culture an ordinary feature of social life in Britain’s urban areas’ (xi). It is important to note that this state he defines does not, in Gilroy’s words, ‘describe an absence of racism or the triumph of tolerance’ (ibid). Instead, he argues that it ‘suggests a different setting for their empty, inter-personal rituals’ which ‘have started to mean different things in the absence of any strong belief in absolute or integral races’ (ibid). Yet Gilroy is also optimistic, to a degree, seeing this conviviality as a useful for tool for resurrecting a multiculturalism that has suffered in a post-9/11 world, as long as we acknowledge that ‘the imperial and colonial past continues to shape political life in the overdeveloped-but-no-longer-imperial countries’ (2). 

Gilroy notes that one manner in which this colonial history continues to thrive is in ‘the calculus that assigns differential value to lives’, a calculus that:

considers that some abject human bodies are more easily and appropriately humiliated, imprisoned, shackled, starved and destroyed than others. These obvious distinctions effectively revived a colonial economy in which infrahumanity, measured against the benchmark of healthier imperial standards, diminished rights and deferred recognition. (11)

This revived colonial economy, what Gilroy describes as a ‘new imperialism and the belligerent reconstruction of colonial adventures’ (in Oyedeji 78), thrives in the work of Brian Chikwava and Peter Akinti, authors whose debut novels offer up two experiences of modern-day African immigration to London. The stories remind us of the skewed sense of egalitarianism which can arise in the absence of civic politics and a de-politicisation of race. They are novels with a cautionary tale, echoing their forebears and alerting us that, at least for the time being, we must not lose sight of the imperialistic tentacles rooted in the nation’s soil. London in 2012, in what could prove to be one of its finest moments, welcomed the world to participate in the Olympics and revel in the city’s celebration. However, perhaps one thing lost in the festivities, and the idea of the transient Londoner, is how London welcomes those who arrive, not for a temporary stay, but for sanctuary hoping for a better future, just like the protagonists of the aforementioned novels had in previous decades. What we find in the case of Akinti and Chikwava’s work is a London which the newly arrived discover to be ‘lonely’ as ‘Inglan’ shows it can indeed still be ‘a bitch’ at times. In both novels there are protagonists who leap out of the frying pan, only to tumble into the fire.

*

Brian Chikwava’s Harare North tells the story of an unnamed protagonist who arrives in London from Zimbabwe, ‘disappointing’ immigration officers at Gatwick airport by mouthing the magic word ‘asylum’ and bearing ‘the toothy grin of a ‘friendly African native’ (Chikwava 4). From the outset we learn that his personal goal is not to seek long-term asylum and remain in ‘Harare North’ (the Zimbabwean’s colloquial term for London), but to ‘graft’, save his money and return home (ibid). He gives himself a target figure to reach, that of US $5,000, which he continually repeats and reaffirms throughout the novel. This is the sum he needs to ‘buy’ his way back into Zimbabwe and avoid returning to prison, having been blamed, as a fledgling member of the Green Bombers, for the death of an alleged opposition party supporter. He is an exile by circumstance, a visitor in London who ‘sits tight’ because ‘there is no reason going back home if you can’t buy your freedom from them those hyenas’ (21) — ‘hyenas’ being the police, who can miraculously make his ‘docket’ disappear for a mere US $4,000.

Chikwava chooses to write in a first-person narrative, giving his protagonist an authentic provincial Zimbabwean voice by having him speak in a broken pidgin English that is both sharp and biting in places. It is a narrative voice which ensures he will continue to remain on the periphery of life in London, and serves to remind the reader throughout that the protagonist is an outsider. Yet with this, Chikwava — himself a Zimbabwean native now residing in London —  rewrites the British novel. He is also following in a tradition of Commonwealth writers choosing to create novels with a language or lexicon more familiar to their communities; here authors such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Ken Saro-Wiwa immediately spring to mind as clear examples. However, Chikwava moves the process along one step further by taking this legacy and placing it back in the empire’s mother country, Britain, and its capital, London. The broken English is a legacy of the imperial influence, a hybrid, which Chikwava brings back to its ‘roots’ in order to engage in a cultural conversation. Harare North is, then, the result of the Commonwealth talking back to Britain.[2]

In Harare North this ‘conversation’ and the protagonist’s life revolves around the south London area of Brixton. The iconography of the neighbourhood is captured in the novel; Brixton Tube station functions as the central hub of activity and there are references to the local Lambeth Town Hall. However, very early on Chikwava warns that Brixton is also a place of hostility, which lacks  at least on the surface  a sense of community that the townships of Harare might contain:

At Brixton station people is leaping into my face from every direction. None of them talk to each each. They is just pushing faces into mine and walking. They don’t smile. (7)

If, by the end of the novel, we are to believe that our protagonist and his friend Shingi are one and the same person, two spirits occupying the same body  a split personality, if you will  then our reading of the text urges us to revisit the novel’s prologue, to where our protagonist has inherited his place in history, a stereotype, a form * that of the African immigrant as an illegal trespasser:

It don’t matter that I am illegal; I have keep his passport because his asylum application get approved by the immigration people some while ago. His passport and National Insurance number come in handy now. His mobile too. (2)

Our protagonist shuns Shingi, rejecting — given the marginalisation he has experienced — any part of him that might be seen as a legal resident of the state. Instead of taking ownership of a legal status which would begin the process of citizenship and claiming its necessary accoutrements — a passport and National Insurance number — the unnamed protagonist paints himself instead as someone illegally using these items as a method of survival. He needs to take his legitimate ownership of them away in order to better understand his place in London. He is not the legal resident ‘Shingi’; instead he is nameless, the latest in a long line of undocumented immigrants who have entered the country. He cannot tell ‘Shingi’s mother’ that Shingi is dying because he sees no reason in ‘making she cry’ (2) but, nevertheless, for our unnamed protagonist the city and its surroundings are slowly destroying the memory of Shingi, the part of him which represents the man who tried to make a way for himself legally; this memory is replaced with that of the man in situ, with no name and an alien status, who is losing his mind and wandering London’s streets near naked.

*

We should consider the fraught relationship between the protagonist and the relatives who sponsor his visa to the United Kingdom. It is the dynamic between them which exemplifies Gilroy’s ideas of status joining race in underscoring a hierarchy that designates people as being infrahuman (Gilroy 12). While Gilroy specifies a racial hierarchy, the notion can be ascribed to nationalism where, regardless of race and origin, over time one is able to ‘buy into’ the longstanding national sense of imperialism and superiority entwined in the very fabric of the country. What we encounter oftentimes is a population of settled migrants (and the descendants of these migrants) who occupy a position of ‘privilege’ and relative agency and who are, to an extent, at ease with their place in the city. But it is that kind of a comfort which can be disrupted by the interaction with the newly arrived migrant. Whereas previously legislation written into the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 and other following Acts and amendments ensured there was a communal sense of arrival — people arrived in droves at the docks of Tilbury and found neighbours who shared a similar story —  today immigration to the UK is arguably the preserve of those with access — the most visible groups being the two extremes of the privileged and the dispossessed, from the highly skilled migrant, businessmen and soccer prospects to refugees and asylum seekers. A shift in UK immigration policy has obvious ramifications on how new migrants are viewed and their relationship with previously settled migrants. In many instances networks and groups of immigrants, who were once, relatively, of the same lowly economic standing, have seemingly made a place for themselves. Immigration is individualised, it is no longer communal and, with this, the pressure to support newly arrived migrants often falls on direct relatives, both the nuclear and distant. However, negotiating the city often represents a continual struggle of identity for the migrant who has been in London for decades and how they are viewed by those back home in their mother countries; it is a struggle that goes unseen and creates a discrepancy between the economic success and prosperity that those back home expected the migrant to achieve and the reality of their circumstances in London. In Harare North, the protagonist relies on his relatives, Paul and Sekai, but the relationship is strained. On his entry to the United Kingdom, the protagonist realises almost immediately that his reliance on Paul and Sekai could be fraught with difficulty when he is forced to spend an extra two days detained by immigration because they do not show up to collect him:

But my relatives, they show worryful attitude: I have to wait another two days for my cousin’s wife to come and fetch me . . . that it take so long for my cousin and his wife to do anything about me is not a good sign. (Chikwava 4)

Instead of his cousin Paul collecting him from the detention centre, Paul’s wife Sekai turns up and, in the protagonist’s words, ‘keep some distance that is good enough to suggest to them detention centre people that she really have nothing to do with me but have been forced into situation’ (5). This is the situation of many settled migrants, the idea that they are forced, out of a sense of duty, to take in newly migrated members of their family. In considering Sekai’s view of her husband’s cousin, we also encounter a different perspective, that of the settled migrant perceiving the new arrival as a threat, something beneath them, someone untrained and undisciplined, as though there are some rites of passage they must go through before they too can feel they have some stake in the imperial legacy of the nation. Sekai snorts in a mocking way, rolls her eyes and looks at our unnamed protagonist when he tells her he has no money. By the end of his first day in London, the protagonist knows Sekai does not want him to stay with them. Those entrenched cultural and traditional responsibilities that Paul and Sekai would normally have towards our protagonist, as a newly arrived member of the family, are discarded; as settled migrants they now refuse to be taken advantage of, leaving our protagonist at a disadvantage where he once would have placed a certain degree of trust and reliance upon them as relations who have already undergone the process of migration and citizenship. Yet there are hints that Harare North’s unnamed protagonist is acutely aware of the attitudes and limitations of settled migrants, and the danger of placing high expectations on them.

But that’s how all them people from home behave when they is in Harare North; sometimes you talk to them on the phone asking if they don’t mind if you come and live with them and they don’t say ‘no’ because they don’t want you to think that they is selfish. They always say ‘ . . . OK, just get visa and come...’. (6)

He then goes on to describe how relations in London would invite family in Zimbabwe to join them abroad, not expecting to ever actually receive them, and that these migrants relied on the rigour of very same system that they had had to go through to stop their family from joining them. The British High Commission and the stringent visa process would aid them in not ever having to honour their word:

When they know that the visa is where everyone hit the wall because the British High Commission don’t just give visa to any native who think he can flag down jet plane, jump on it and fly off to Harare North, especially when they notice that people get them visitors’ visa and then on landing in London they do this style of claiming asylum. So people is now getting that old consulate treatment: the person behind the counter window give you severe look and ask you to bring more of this and that and throw back your papers, and before you even gather them together he have call up the next person. (ibid)

For our protagonist the system and process of immigration is almost a game of cat and mouse, a process whereby the visa applicant must use their wits to negotiate a path to the UK, but the bureaucrats themselves also have to resort to whatever ends they can to make it difficult for applicants to receive visas. This, according to our protagonist, is a visa situation which suits the settled migrants in London, a process that, in his words, allows the ‘British High Commission to do the dirty work for them [the migrants]’ (ibid). Throughout the protagonist’s stay with his relatives, Paul treats him with indifference while Sekai treats him with contempt; it is only when he secures employment and believes Sekai will give him up to Immigration officers (he is not supposed to be working under the terms of his pending asylum application) that he finally decides to leave the house.

*

The process by which the new migrant is made to feel infrahuman is also one of the central tenets found in Peter Akinti’s Forest Gate. The novel tells the story of Meina and James Morrison and how they are forever linked by the suicide of Meina’s sixteen-year-old brother, Ashvin. As young Somalis, Meina and Ashvin have known civil war for most of their lives, and their country’s political and territorial instability represents a sense of normalcy to them, but the war arrives on their doorstep when their parents are killed by Ethiopian troops. Having been granted asylum in the UK under the stewardship of their guardian Larry Bloom, Ashvin discovers he has contracted HIV through being raped by Ethiopian troops [3] and he is later diagnosed with bi-polar disorder.

The novel locates itself in a space where the ‘dilapidated rooftops and tower blocks . . . are as oppressive as the environment in which they were built’ (Akinti 3). It is this and the despondency permeating the novel’s pages that allows Akinti to paint a bleak landscape; the Wanstead Flats in Forest Gate in east London is a neighbourhood replete with ‘the muscular smell of refuse’ that covers everything

like concrete in your developed world. It mingled with the tightly coiled smell of stale urine and frying bacon and camel stew. The horizon, as far as the eye could see, was enveloped in the gritty fabric of the London skyline at night, traces of the permanent stench, the stooping rhythms of failure. (ibid)

The two young black men, Ashvin and James — one a refugee and the other born and raised in London — are both united in facing ‘a future world they felt was stacked against them’ (5). They are full of resentment for many reasons, but both of them despise their environment and share a refusal to succumb to what it means to be a young black man growing up on an urban estate in London. The pressures placed on them are not just by the criminal and gang culture of their environment, but also because of police brutality and lack of opportunities. It is a struggle against dual forces which Fatimah Kelleher had previously identified as a motif often found in the Black British novel situated in a low-income inner city populated environment:

As stories of struggle, the battles waged within these urban vistas are often dual: of fights within the community to overcome the agents of its nihilistic reality such as pimps, dealers and false-friends; and against a much wider system of repression embodied through institutional racism in particular, the police. (245)

Akinti shows us that you do not need to look far to find chaos and disorder — Ashvin’s parents were murdered by Ethiopian troops, and both he and his mother were raped. We contrast this to the London he has come to for asylum as a ‘refugee’ — the very definition of which derives from refuge —  and the idea that London ought to represent a safe space in which to begin a new life. The London they arrive in is a different kind of battleground, but a battleground nonetheless. It is James’s world, a place where he lives ‘three doors down from the flat where that five-year-old girl was shot in the back with her father, in a flat where they earned a living selling crack’ (Akinti 43). James’s own mother is a crack addict while his father served as a drug dealer before he was murdered at the hands of people whom he considered friends. James’s four brothers have followed in their father’s footsteps, eking out a measure of notoriety for their efforts as drug dealers, and by the novel’s end all of them will also die, killed in a murder-suicide at the hands of the eldest. The death of black men and boys is a constant feature of Forest Gate and the police are always on the edge of the young men’s lives, physically harassing them, molesting them and then later questioning James over a murder.

Akinti creates in Ashvin a character who is ill-equipped for both worlds. It is something Meina recognises and she comments on her brother following his death:

When we first arrived in London he allowed himself to become angry and he forgot what we were taught by our parents about the well-being of the spirit and the heart. He said he wanted to fight, but London was different. Where we came from we knew the faces of the enemy. In London, there was no one to aim for. In London, he said, you never saw who kept you down. (5)

Where Ashvin sees himself as a victim, Meina displays a self-reflexivity that she uses as armour, protecting her from her experiences and the times she is made to feel infrahuman. Riding in the back of a police car, for instance, on her way to view her brother’s body, she immediately becomes a subject to be scrutinised, like an animal in a pen. She feels as though assumptions are made about her, while simultaneously viewing those subjects through the lens of Jane Austen novels, something considered fixed and representative of the nation:

. . . but there was this one old couple  they looked like Mr And Mrs Bennett from that Jane Austen book  who pulled up in a new Volvo the colour of an avocado and they were looking at me, talking about me in my face like I was a monkey or like they’d already made up their minds. I stared them down. The way they looked at me was so English, so imperial. (16)

Meina, as viewed as a black person in the back of a police car, is dominated, victimised and becomes a subject of the white gaze and all its scrutiny. Yet, at the same time, with its references to Jane Austen, Akinti recognises that his novel will be juxtaposed with the literary bastions of the nation; that the novel of African descent, the African migration novel, like the story itself, will be subject to the same kind of scrutiny and forever compared to the likes of Jane Austen. Just as this kind of introspection, this awareness, this self-reflexivity is Meina’s saving grace (whereas Ashvin falls victim to anger and resentment), the self-reflexivity of the migratory novel is what allows it to stand against its forebears in English literature.

In Forest Gate, the ‘Scare Dem Crew’, a gang which is made up mostly of black boys, dubs Ashvin a ‘Paki liar’ (28) for asserting he is from Africa. It is a word loaded with the history of hate crimes in the UK, a derogatory term used against 510 people of south Asian descent, one associated with the fascist and racist gangs of the 1970s and 1980s. Now it is on the lips of young black men, who are using it in very much the same way, to declare not just their difference but also their superiority. Like Chikwava, Akinti recognises the resistance that migrants face does not simply emerge from the state or dominant race, but also from people of colour. The very notion of what it once meant to be a migrant or black resident in Britain is brought into question; civic solidarity has been put aside in favour of a racial politics that has been individualised. It can be argued that people of colour in Britain have bought into what Gilroy asserts as ‘the appeal of sub- and supranational forms of identification’, where

any new arrivals will henceforth be expected to learn and to adhere to traditional norms and values even though they may not be widely practiced in the country at large. (Gilroy 28)

This is a subject which necessitates much more investigation as, at the very least, Chikwava and Akinti’s novels merit this. There are many more examples in their work exemplifying how newly arrived immigrants in the twenty-first century manage to expose deeply entrenched imperial ideas where hierarchal values attached to humanity continue to exist in Britain and the metropolis of London. All this at a time where, it is argued, people of colour have asserted a confidence and there is a genuine millennial optimism about the future of race relations in Britain.

——

Notes

[1] London last hosted the Olympics in 1948 after being awarded the games in 1944. Both the 1940 and 1944 games were cancelled as a result of World War Two.

[2] It is worth mentioning here that Zimbabwe was suspended from the Commonwealth of Nations in March 2002 due to its policy of land distribution before formerly withdrawing themselves in December 2003.

[3] See Akinti, Peter, Forest Gate 5. Ashvin describes to his friend James how troops discovered him hiding when they entered his home, and three soldiers raped him in front of his parents before killing them. During his time in London, in the aftermath of a fight with a young man of Ethiopian descent, Nalma, Ashvin rapes him with the knowledge that he is HIV-positive and describes this rape to James as ‘revenge’ for what ‘his people did’ (9).

Works Cited

Akinti, Peter. Forest Gate. London: Jonathan Cape, 2009. 

Arana, R Victoria. ‘The 1980s: Retheorising and Refashioning British Identity’. Write Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature. Ed. Kadija Sesay. Hertford: Hansib, 2005.

Chikwava, Brian. Harare North. London: Jonathan Cape, 2009.

Emecheta, Buchi. In The Ditch. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1972.

Fryer, Peter. Staying Power. London: Pluto Press, 1984.

Gilroy, Paul. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? London: Routledge, 2004. Johnson, Linton Kwesi. Inglan Is A Bitch. London: Race Today,

Kelleher, Fatimah. ‘Concrete Vistas and Dreamtime Peoplescapes: The Rise of the Black Urban Novel in 1990s Britain’. Write Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature. Ed. Kadija Sesay. Hertford: Hansib, 2005. 

McLeod, John. Post Colonial London Rewriting the Metropolis. London: Routledge 2004.

Naipaul, V S. The Mimic Men. London: Deutsch, 1967. 

Oyedeji, Koye. ‘Interview with Paul Gilroy, Black Britain: A Photographic History’. Sable (Spring/Summer 2008): 68-80. 

Rutherford, Jonathan. ‘The Third Space. Interview with Homi Bhaba’. Ders. (Hg): Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990.

Sandhu, Sukhdev. London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City. London: HarperCollins, 2003. 

Selvon, Sam. The Lonely Londoners. London: Wingate, 1956. 

Taylor, Craig. ‘True Londoners Are Extinct’. The New York Times 4 Mar. 2012: 23-25.