Abstract
When, in 1948, the Empire Windrush docked in London with its 500 Caribbean passengers, the event heralded the start of major demographic changes in Britain. West Indian immigration to Britain was not the only postwar migration, but it has a unique history because of its connection with the British Empire and slavery. When West Indians arrived in Britain, there was already a long history of British writers depicting the Caribbean nations and their subjects in particular ways in children’s literature; this introduction examines some of those depictions and their impact on the new immigrants.
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Notes
- 1.
For Alan Richardson, the confrontation is with “the authority claimed by…pastors, masters, and parents” (“The Politics of Childhood” 863) and for Helen Thomas it is with “colonial ideology and cultural difference” (Romanticism and Slave Narratives 120).
- 2.
- 3.
This was the tradition of the time—the field of anthropology and its idea of preserving cultures was gaining ground in Britain, and children’s authors, including the color fairy book author Andrew Lang, had an interest in producing such texts. See my chapter, “Primitive Minds: Anthropology, Children and Savages in Andrew Lang and Rudyard Kipling.” Worlds Enough and Time: Childhood in Edwardian Fiction. Eds. Adrienne Gavin and Andrew Humphries. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 177–190.
- 4.
McKay published Songs of Jamaica in 1912, which included the poem, “My Native Land, My Home” that begins: Dere is no land dat can compare/ Wid you where’er I roam;/ In all de wul’ none like you fair,/My native land, my home (84).
- 5.
See Tiffany M. B. Anderson, “‘Ten Little Niggers’: The Making of a Black Man’s Consciousness.” Folklore Forum May 1, 2009. Folkloreforum.net. Web.
- 6.
See Discourse, Figure (1971) in which Jean François Lyotard suggests that “Language is not a homogeneous environment; it is divisive because it…interiorizes the figural in the articulated” (7–8). No longer is the photograph—or even the photograph with its single word accompaniment—sufficient, because the photograph is contained within, and shaped by, the language used to describe it.
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Sands-O’Connor, K. (2017). Introduction: We’re Here Because You Were There—The Beginnings of Publishing for a Black British Audience. In: Children’s Publishing and Black Britain, 1965-2015. Critical Approaches to Children's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57904-1_1
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