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Research in African Literatures 34.2 (2003) 213-215



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Sea Change: Black British Writing, edited by Lauri Ramey. Special Issue of BMA: The Sonia Sanchez Literary Review 6.2 ( 2001). vi + 220 pp. ISSN 1078-0955.
The Booker Prize and the Legacy of Empire, by Luke Strongman. Cross/Cultures 54. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002. xxiii + 277 pp. ISBN 90-420-1488-1 paper.

We were taught that imperialists are changed culturally and racially by those they conquer. The context was then the Greeks and Romans, but the rule applies to contemporary England and its former empire. The two works under review examine the effects of its former empire on present British culture. Luke Strongman's book discusses England's foremost literary prize, while Sea Change publishes the first conference on Black British writing held in the USA, at Howard University during 2000.

Around the time of its twenty-fifth anniversary, the Booker Prize seemed a good subject for a book, especially a study of the literary market. Unlike most literary prizes the Booker is always preceded with much publicity and there is usually some scandal at the awards dinner and afterwards, such as judges denouncing the taste of others in the committee. That the six shortlisted books often comprised at least one Commonwealth novel, a novel from the Celtic fringe, and such other highbrow exotics as Thomas Keneally's Schindler's Ark, produced an annual outcry. Why did the prize so often go to some foreigner named Naipaul (1971), Jhabvala (1975), Gordimer (1974), Rushdie (1981), Coetzee (1983, 1999), Hulme (1985), Carey (1988), Okri (1991), Ondaatje (1992), Doyle (1993), or Roy (1997)? Who would win a second Booker? In 1993 Midnight's Children was voted the best novel of the past twenty-five years, but neither Rushdie nor Peter Carey was the first to win two Bookers—Coetzee did. Even the British who won awards, such as J. G. Farrell (1973) and Paul Scott (1978), wrote about the former empire. And when someone did write a prize-winning domestic British novel, Remains of the Day (1989), his name was Ishiguro.

Actually there were awards given to British authors writing about life in England, especially during the early years of the Booker, but hardly anyone can remember them, whereas people read and kept talking about In a Free State (1971), Midnight's Children (1981), The Famished Road (1991), or The [End Page 213] English Patient (1992). The Booker had become a barometer of changing tastes; interest had shifted from a drab postimperial England to its former colonies, memories of the empire, how the former colonials saw England, the new immigrant communities, the insecurities of being British, and the parallel cultural and linguistic assertion in Ireland and Scotland. The new subject matter required different forms than in the past; provincial working class realism and middle-class social comedy were pushed to the side by the expansive energies of Magic Realism and other mixed forms. It might seem that this was part of the supposed postcolonial fragmentation of nations into their constituent groups, but the Booker awards and finalists were not notably about gays or lesbians. Those British novels that rose to the top, such as A. S. Byatt's Possession (1990), contrasted an energetic past to a pallid present.

Obviously material for several books, and part of any history of English literature in the second half of the twentieth century. First to score was Richard Todd's Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today (Bloomsbury, 1996). But the real winner would explain what all this meant in relation to postcolonial theories. The British could not be interested in reading about the Commonwealth, liberation struggles, or new nations, or even the Celts, unless they were guilty of something. Hence Graham Huggan's The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (Routledge, 2001) discusses postcolonial literatures and criticism as complicit in selling postimperialist nostalgia to the West. It is one of those books in which everyone is somehow guilty, including Naipaul, Rushdie, Kureishi, as well as the Booker...

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