Urban generations: Post-colonial cities
01-03 October 2004
Conference Abstracts
35. McLeod, John; University of Leeds, UK: "Millennial Currents: postcolonial London writing in the
1990s"
This paper explores the representation of London by
1990s postcolonial writers as a space of determined creativity,
muted celebration and continued resistance to the city’s social
conflicts which have emerged from Britain’s colonial legacy
and post-war racialising turn. It contrasts the gloomy predictions
of David Dabydeen and others at the beginning of the decade concerning
London’s social and cultural difficulties with the ‘millennial
optimism’ with which it closed, articulated chiefly through
the public support of the work of Zadie Smith, Meera Syal and others.
Writers during the 1990s turned to London as a potentially utopian
site of transcultural creativity which offered the means to imagine
new images of the city beyond the divisive logic of racism and discrimination,
and also nation; and in projecting London in this way, figures such
as Dabydeen, Fred D’Aguiar and Bernardine Evaristo offered
a powerful and transformative cultural retort to a series of enduring
social difficulties (epitomised most brutally by the murder of Stephen
Lawrence in April 1993). 1990s writers pointed to the social and
cultural problems which have endured into a new century while they
also looked forward to the refashioning of London as a transcultural
space of social possibility at the turn of a new century. As Bernardine
Evaristo writes in Lara, ‘the future means transformation’.
