| During the last two decades, black Britons have found themselves engaged in redefining what it means to be British. The revision of the Nationality Act in 1981 and the policies of the Thatcher years initiated a return to the glorious past, which created a revival of national pride. This, however, created an atmosphere of tension between those for whom nationalism symbolized the spirit of imperialism and for those who viewed it as an excuse to enforce alienation and exclusion.The British identity began to be reflected from several perspectives in the fiction, drama and poetry of the 1990s. A new generation of writers---including Courttia Newland, Diran Adebayo, Andrea Levy, Zadie Smith, Bernardine Evaristo, S.I. Martin, and Jackie Kay---offer a hybrid cultural alternative to the narrow perspective of English literature that reflects a racially homogeneous Britain. The new voices that appeared as a result of the search for national identity and its affect on the identity of the black individual all challenge the notion that "blackness" and "Britishness" are mutually incompatible.This dissertation argues that the black British writers of the 1990s not only resist exclusion of differences, but they also redefine what it means to be British from within the "third Space." A space they accept on their own terms by subverting marginality and hybridity as non-British traits. Whereas others have discussed these writers as writing from the margins, they have not emphasized them as British writers whose experiences with, and exploration of, being "Other influences their understanding of the terms "blackness" and "Britishness" to mean the same thing. |
