Slavery fiction in Britain

Abstract

This article analyses significant examples of slavery fiction published in Britain by writers who have family links to Africa and the Caribbean. As children of immigrants who had come to Britain after World War II, Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen, Fred D’Aguiar, Andrea Levy and Bernardine Evaristo shared the uncertainties of coming of age in a society that offered no space for their identities as individuals with roots in other continents. This article reviews some of their fictions and considers them as a group in their re-creation of British involvement in the slave trade and slavery. They refocus the lens of history and present the perspectives of African enslaved and free individuals in stories of human suffering but also of agency and resistance. These fictions reconstruct the role of slavery in the British past as they write against traditional abolition-oriented narratives of the nation.