Extravagant Strangers

More about the book

Aiming to show that the mongrelization of Britain and British literature began well before the second half of the 20th century, this selection incorporates 18th-century black writers with direct experience of the slave trade, such as Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano. It also looks at white writers whose accident of birth took place in a British colony, resulting in a similar sense of ambivalence, whether in the jingoism of a Rudyard Kipling or the social commitment of a George Orwell. And it reflects the emergence of a group of writers who demonstrate the same mixture of attachment and detachment which marks them as products of the British Empire, including V.S. Naipaul and Linton Kwesi Johnson.