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201 As white working-class migrants continued to make the trek from inner cities to suburban estates and New Towns, another era of migration was getting under way—one that resulted in today’s “multiracial” Britain. In 1948 colonial subjects of color were granted right of entry to the country under the British Nationality Act, and in some cases the government positively encouraged their immigration to make up for postwar labor shortages. The docking of the SS Empire Windrush later that year brought the first members of the socalled New Commonwealth to British shores, and their presence has changed the face of Britain, particularly its urban areas. Labor shortages in the steel and textile industries brought immigrants to cities and towns with depopulating core areas, especially London. They arrived just in time to occupy the urban centers that many white working-class resident had fled—or been forced to leave—for suburban estates and New Towns. In their account of the Windrush generation, Mike Phillips andTrevor Phillips point out that while “the tendency to suburbanisation” led England’s former city dwellers “out to the borders” of the metropolis, the New Commonwealth immigrants played a major part in transforming “huge swathes of the inner city” for themselves (383). The results of this process are fairly well-known. On the one hand, Commonwealth immigrants to London and other cities faced poverty, lack of opportunity , and racism that led to riots, most notably in the London neighborhoods of Notting Hill and Brixton. Paul Gilroy has shown how thoroughly “contemporary definitions of ‘race’” in postwar Britain have been intertwined with “the supposed primitivism and violence of black residents in inner-city areas,” so that the very idea of race itself has “come to connote the urban crisis as a whole” and to “embody racial problems even where they are not overtly acknowledged or defined” (228–29). To this extent their placement in the city has marked Epilogue “In the Blood and Not on the Skin” 202 Epilogue subjects of color, quite literally, as a race apart from the nation proper. On the other hand, as Phillips and Phillips suggest, members of the Windrush generation and their descendents also embraced urban life because it allowed them “to engage with the broad currents of modernity” while at the same time “remodelling and modernising British cities” for themselves (383). In a nation where they confronted inequality, prejudice, and segregation, many immigrants saw London and other cities as places that could “equalise choices,” “level out differences ,” and “put people together. . . . The consequence has been to radicalise public discussion about the identity of the nation” (387). Not surprisingly, urban settings dominate postcolonial immigrant literature. From Sam Selvon and George Lamming to Buchi Emecheta, Salman Rushdie, and Monica Ali, London—and particularly the “inner city”—has for better or worse been the primary backdrop of the postcolonial experience in Britain. But in recent years, as James Procter points out, suburbia has also become “one of the most significant settings of black and Asian cultural production” (125). This is a surprising turn of events, since non-whites were long kept out of the suburbs—by estate agents who discouraged them from moving and by home owners who refused to sell to them. Those who attempted to make the move to the suburbs likely did so without large numbers of fellow immigrants (Clapson , Suburban 85–87). Yet certain inner suburbs were not without a minority presence. Saskia Sassen locates London’s non-white residential concentration in two main areas: the “inner city” boroughs with a high African and Caribbean population and the “outer city” or inner suburban boroughs with high numbers of South Asians (like Brent, Ealing, Hounslow, and Waltham Forest) (271). In contrast to the experience of West Indians and Africans, suburbanization has been relatively common among Hindus, Sikhs, and to a lesser extent Muslims (Clapson, Suburban 117). Suburbia’s recent prominence as a site of multiracial British culture is due in large part to the filmmaker and fiction writer Hanif Kureishi. Though Kureishi was not the first postcolonial artist to set his work in a suburb—that claim probably belongs to V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men (1967)—his 1990 novel The Buddha of Suburbia has done more than any recent work to naturalize mixedrace suburbans within the national imaginary by demonstrating their physical, cultural, and emotional connectedness to suburbia. Kureishi is central to the generation of writers and artists whom Stuart Hall describes in terms...

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