Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story offers the first systematic study of black British short story writing, tracing its development from the 1950s to the present with a particular focus on contemporary short stories by Hanif Kureishi, Jackie Kay, Suhayl Saadi, Zadie Smith, and Hari Kunzru. By combining a postcolonial framework of analysis with Jean-Luc Nancy’s deconstructive philosophy of community, the book charts key tendencies in black British short fiction and explores how black British writers use the short story form to combat deeply entrenched notions of community and experiment with non-essentialist alternatives across differences of ethnicity, culture, religion, and nationality.
Table of Content
1. Introduction.- 2. Theories of Community.- 3. The West Indian Immigrant Community: Samuel Selvon.- 4. The Emergence of a Black British Community: Farrukh Dhondy.- 5. “A New Way of Being British”: Kureishi’s ‘Ethnic’ Short Stories.- 6. Human Commonalities: Kureishi’s ‘Postethnic’ Short Stories.- 7. Scottish Singular Plurality: Jackie Kay.- 8. Scottish Community between Essence and (De-)Construction: Suhayl Saadi.- 9. Accidental Englishness: Zadie Smith.- 10. Tour du Monde: Hari Kunzru.- 11. The World as Singular Plural Composite: Suhayl Saadi.- 12. Conclusion.
About the author
Bettina Jansen is Research Assistant and Lecturer for English Literature at TU Dresden, Germany. She is also the co-editor of the first German-language handbook on masculinity studies, Männlichkeit: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch (2016, with Stefan Horlacher and Wieland Schwanebeck).
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