ABSTRACT
The continued use of black British writing as a frame of reference creates a space for sustained attention on racial politics which might otherwise be occluded. In aesthetic terms, the speculation evokes a reworking of realist form, so that the notion of a representative fiction of the present is disrupted by moments of possibility which encourage readers to engage in acts of reimagining the interplay between identity, nationhood, and belonging. Such fiction is rooted in the conceptual frameworks dominating thinking about race and ethnicity in the 1990s, most notably Paul Gilroy’s work on planetary humanism and post-racial community, and alongside these ideas the theories of diasporic cosmopolitanism and cultural diversity advanced by postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha. Criticism on the fiction of the 1990s such as R Victoria Arana’s work stresses the writing’s lack of anger when compared to its 1980s forbears: a fiction defined by confident belonging and multicultural carnivalesque, what John McLeod terms ‘millennial optimism’.
