Black Arts in Britain: literary visual performative

Contemporary Britain is changing rapidly. The cultural diversity brought about by the demise of the colonial empire and imposing migratory flows, alongside the impact of more recent global phenomena, have created a complex society that is still interrogating itself on its composition, aims and meanings. At the same time the arts have become more central to everyday life and to the debate on what the face of today’s Britain might be. Black Arts in Britain provides a multi–disciplinary platform for a critical investigation of the ethnically diverse topography of British culture. Through the work of Black British authors and artists, it explores literature, cinema, theatre, architecture and the visual arts with a focus on the articulation of new identities and the questioning of forms of third–millennium citizenship. It examines creative experiences that map out cross-cultural terrains of affirmation and contestation, discontinuity and proximity, impossibility and promise. It highlights profound tensions and equally deep inter–cultural forces at work in the poetry, painting, music, fiction, film, photography of the last decades, and is both an introduction to and a critical reassessment of the location of “black” cultures in the context of third–millennium Britain.