Abstract
This chapter establishes Samuel Selvon’s pathfinding role in the development of the black British short story. It examines the negotiation of community in Selvon’s ‘London stories’, published as part of his only story collection Ways of Sunlight (1957), which arguably signal the beginning of black British short story writing. Jansen shows that Selvon’s short stories are typical of early black British writing insofar as they are permeated by the essentialist logic of us versus them, white resident versus non-white immigrant, former coloniser versus formerly colonised. Selvon’s stories depict how West Indian immigrants develop a closely-knit multiethnic and multinational community in postwar London as they are faced with racist discrimination and structural exclusion from a society that clings to a monocultural, anglocentric notion of Britishness. Nevertheless, Jansen demonstrates that even Selvon’s early stories challenge the thinking of community as essence in various ways, most radically in “My Girl and the City”.
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Jansen, B. (2018). The West Indian Immigrant Community: Samuel Selvon. In: Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94860-7_3
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