ABSTRACT
“We are here because you were there.” One of the key mantras of antiracist organizing in Britain, this slogan reminds Britons that their imperial history did not end when the last troops packed up and left colonies such as India, Kenya, and Hong Kong. In the final decades of the century, Britain’s imperial legacy asserted itself remorselessly. The British heritage of racism led to bigotry and attacks, which sparked antiracist uprisings by the country’s black and Asian populations repeatedly in the 1980s and 1990s. Writers used vernacular aesthetic forms to forge community in the face of xenophobia as well as to challenge the stereotyping and scapegoating to which people of color were subjected in the dominant media. The place of the writer was not always clear, however, and incidents such as the Rushdie Affair demonstrated the explosive intertwining of aesthetics and politics in relation to global issues of race and religion as the millennium approached. While Britain’s so-called ethnic minorities fought for equality, subordinated white cultures such as the Scots and Welsh asserted their autonomy through the cultivation of distinct linguistic and aesthetic forms. Finally, the unsettling of traditional patriarchal gender and sexual relations that had been unfolding throughout the twentieth century gathered pace as queer writers battled against stigmatization following the AIDS pandemic, unearthing queer histories and fighting for the integrity of queer lives.
