ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on very selectively, in a vast field, at alterity in theory and literature from the 1940s to the 1990s. This includes Negritude – new writing in French West Africa and the Caribbean aligned to struggles for national liberation – and, the work of Frantz Fanon on the cultural coercion of colonialism. From writing in English, the work of Sam Selvon, Andrea Levy, Jean Rhys, Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Tsitsi Dangarembga. Small Island draws on the experiences of Levy's parents, who arrived on the Empire Windrush in 1948 to settle in north London, and their generation. Another account of Windrush-generation life, written closer to the time, is Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners, which begins on a grim winter's evening in London as smog creeps over the streets – a problem in London until the 1960s – and Moses boards a bus in Notting Hill.
