A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain, 1700-2000, and: African-British Writings in the Eighteenth Century: The Politics of Race and Reason (review)

The two books under review here are part of a corpus we have, over the last two decades or so, become quite familiar with: Both belong to that now flourishing industry of publications that focus on works written by, and addressing the increasingly substantial presence of, colonized or formerly colonized peoples of African and Asian descent within the imperial metropole, Britain. Examples, more generally, of elaborations of the encounter—both physical and epistemological—between colonizer and colonized, dominant and marginal, oppressor and oppressed, both books focus, more specifically, on the literary and cultural work that emerges from this encounter, especially on how the work of writers from the colonized spaces—in Africa, India, and the Caribbean—interacts with and deconstructs the views and values dear to the dominant white populations of the imperial metropole.

There are significant overlaps in both studies in terms of the writers and historical terrain they cover. Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Ottobah Cugoano, Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, and Mary Prince, for example, are accorded extensive attention in both studies. Moreover, a sizable portion of Innes's and all of Woodard's is devoted to the eighteenth century—its writers and the ideas and assumptions that prevailed. The two also share, to an extent, a method whereby writings from the colonial "margins" are read alongside, or in conversation with, those from the "center." There are, however, significant differences between the two as well. Innes, unlike Woodard, focuses on African-British and Asian-British writers; and her study, which covers the years 1750-1948, extends beyond the eighteenth century, which is the focus of Woodard's study. What is more, Innes undertakes what can best be described as a historical survey of "writing by black and Asian writers who since 1750 have made a home in Britain" (2). Woodard's is a more specific argument that, in addressing the "politics of race and reason," seeks to demonstrate "how the category of race can disrupt the rhetoric of Enlightenment humanism" (xi). Read alongside each other, both provide rewarding access, via their analyses, to specific works by African, Asian (in the case of Innes), and canonical white British (in the case of Woodard) writers, and to the historical, social, cultural, and political milieux from which they emerge. Innes's study is more polished. Woodard's, while provocative and interesting in parts, is hobbled by elementary stylistic and typographical errors and infelicities of style that take away somewhat from the force of her argument.

The title of Innes's work, A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain, provides an accurate clue to her subject. However, although in her concluding chapter Innes brings her readers virtually up to the present, that is not her main concern. Her substantive analyses are about a body (or bodies) of work, which appeared before 1948—a date, she notes, that marks "a new beginning with that fresh influx of settlers [from the African and Asian diasporas]" (2). Focusing, in other words, primarily on the writers who "preceded" this 'fresh influx," "who for over 150 years prior to World War II wrote of and to British communities, contributing distinctive insights as outsiders on the inside" (2), she concludes her study at the historical moment which signals the formal end or unraveling of the British empire. (India gained her independence in 1947, with countries in the Caribbean and Africa following suit.) Innes's study is made up of three invaluable "contextual and historical chapters" (6)—the first sketching significant events and ideas in the eighteenth century; the fourth on the...