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Caribbean migration to Britain brought many new things—new music, new foods, new styles. It brought new ways of thinking too. This book explores the intellectual ideas that the West Indians brought with them to Britain. It shows that, for more than a century, West Indians living in Britain developed a dazzling intellectual critique of the codes of Imperial Britain. Chapters discuss the influence of, amongst others, C. L. R. James, Una Marson, George Lamming, Jean Rhys, Claude McKay and V. S. Naipaul. The contributors draw from many different disciplines to bring alive the thought and personalities of the figures they discuss, providing a picture of intellectual developments in Britain from which we can still learn much. The introduction argues that the recovery of this Caribbean past, on the home territory of Britain itself, reveals much about the prospects of multiracial Britain.
, including wartime talks to the West Indies. In addition there are his numerous campaigning letters to government departments and individuals. In his surviving papers there exists the interleaved Bible, which he received as a prize at King’s College, his many annotations providing further insight into his intellectual development, particularly into his theological and political ideas. 10
minister, Marson’s intellectual development took place within the context of a religious home where the activities of playing music and reading poetry were prized, and the conservative and colonial Hampton High School where she received an ‘English public-school education’. 1 However, as one of a small number of black scholarship girls, Marson was apprenticed in the operations of racism by the time she
Western Society , Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1996. 48 Spadafora, The Idea of Progress , p. 331. 49 These seemingly disparate intellectual developments have been summarily dismissed by Spadafora as ‘too vast to rest comfortably on the usually slender