Below are some remarks I was prepared to deliver yesterday, if there'd been time that needed filling. They're keyed in part to a PowerPoint slideshow that you can download and follow along with, if you want.

The most basic accomplishment of this course, as I said in class, has been learning to swim against what Caryl Phillips once called “an undertow of historical ignorance” [Slide 1]: the next time you hear someone speak of Brit Lit as a long homogeneous tradition stretching from Beowulf to T.S. Eliot, you’ll be in a position to correct that—to write black people back into British history and culture.  Andrea Levy (the subject of Marcos’s presentation) once told an interviewer that the sense of being invisible, of having been erased from Britain’s idea of itself and its past, was still, even at the dawn of the twenty-first century, her primary motive for becoming a writer: “If Englishness doesn’t define me,” she famously said, “then [we need to] redefine Englishness.”  For the final essay prompt [Slide 2], I quoted the narrator of Hanif Kureishi’s novel The Buddha of Suburbia, who beginshis storywith an ironic proclamation: “My name is Karim Amir, and I an Englishman born and bred—almost.”  And it’s been the ambition of all the people whose work we’ve studied this semester, I suggested, to remove that qualifier “almost.”

In light of that fact, let me call on Zadie Smith to glance backward again over the past few weeks and recapitulate an idea we’ve already floated a number of times now.  Smith, I’ve said before, is the most famous representative of a younger generation of writers who have tried to imagine new ways, if not entirely unambiguous or unproblematic ways, of representing a post-imperial, post-millennial, post-“black” British nation.  Like Kureishi and Apache Indian and Diran Adebayo and Jackie Kay (and dozens of other writers and artists and performers that Henry Louis Gates and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown mention in articles I put on the “Afterword” page of the Course Reader), Smith is trying out metaphors that are rooted not in birth and breeding, not in procreation and lineage and genealogy, but in other (alternative, creative, even adoptive) ideas of “family”—new paradigms designed to frustrate any presumptuous inquiries about origins and parentage. 
 
Joyce Chalfen may indeed be onto something when she writes that future generations of English offspring ought to be the product of cross-pollination, but what she doesn’t quite realize is that it’s not her business to breed and nurture those offspring.  As a couple of you observed: the sense of dislocation she feels within her own family comes from the fact that “no one needs her as urgently as they once did”—and in that respect, Joyce might even represent Mother England, England-as-Mother-Country, whose antiquated brand of ma-/paternalism nobody needs any more (and really never did).  Britain’s new black baby may have two mommies, then, or two daddies, or both, or neither; it might be transgenic, autogenetic, parthenogenetic; it might be, like Jackie Kay, the adopted biracial daughter of Glaswegian communists; or it might be, as in the end of White Teeth, the uncertain issue of a suburban virgin birth.

The possibilities are legion, and as we’ve seen several times over recently, the newer generations of black British writers have consistently evinced a kind of postmodern hopefulness, a determination to follow Fred D’Aguiar’s lead and let creativity and imagination take them “beyond” the strictures of “black,” in a time when it has become abundantly apparent that race is not always such a useful concept, even if, in practice, it is very hard to escape.

As if to justify that sort of hopefulness, the African-American scholar and critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr. went off to London almost 20 years ago [Slide 3] to document some of the scores of black people who had “made it” in Britain.  Quoting Stuart Hall as his authority, no less, he cheerfully asserted that at the dawn of the new millennium, “being black [was] a way of being British”—no more almost.  The leading indicator of that change, Gates said, was that in Britain, as in America, youth culture was now black culture:  black was what’s hip; black was what sold.   And as I explained last week, black-and-Asian culture was precisely what “New Labour” Prime Minister Tony Blair’s PR flacks co-opted as the foundation of their hip, new “Cool Britannia.”  [Slide 4]

No matter how cynical a move that slogan may have been, it was undeniable—even to judge only by superficial appearances— that Britain had changed radically:  looking back from the vantage point of the year 2000, Caryl Phillips pointed out that the 1990s had really seen the full-blown “emergence of black people in politics, music, sport.  Now[, he said] there [were] black men in suits [and] black women power-dressed with briefcases” walking the streets of Britain’s cities.  It had become utterly common to see black educators and professionals, black doctors and lawyers and judges, black news anchors and TV hosts and actors.  Black celebrities and entertainers were—and are, in 2016, even more so—household names.  These days, in fact, just about any British TV program you could name, from Downton Abbey to Doctor Who, boasts black and Asian characters (although not necessarily black and Asian leads.)  Today, Britain’s most famous architect [Slide 5] is David Adjaye (at least since Zaha Hadid died at the end of March, anyway; Adjaye designed the Smithsonian’s African American Museum in Washington, DC, and President Obama has chosen him to build his presidential library); its most famous visual artist is painter Chris Ofili [click]; its most famous film director is Steve McQueen [click]; its most famous supermodel is Naomi Campbell [click]; and among its most famous actors  are Idris Elba [click], David Oyelowo, Naomi Harris, Thandie Newton, Marianne Jean-Baptiste [click], David Harewood, Delroy Lindo…I could go on.

In short: those little flecks of black in the fabric of British life that we saw on the last page of The Lonely Londoners have become a full-fledged pattern in the weave.  And everybody we’ve read over the past several weeks agrees that because of this changed (or changing) climate, black authors are now freer to write about other things besides racism, alienation, and oppression.

And yet, as we know …“Reality mugged Dele.”  Just because you’re middle class, wear glasses and have a degree from Oxford, that doesn’t mean the cops won’t beat you up or the fascists won’t kill you.  The Institute of Race Relations can furnish the details, but for the most recent year that’s available (2013-14), the official statistics show over 44,000 hate crimes, most of them racially or religiously motivated, recorded by police in England and Wales—and not a few of those crimes were serious assaults.  In the recent past, the IRR estimated that as many as 95,000 more such crimes went unreported each year.  And in the twenty years years following the infamous Stephen Lawrence case (see the "Afterword" page), there were at least 105 more racially motivated murders across Britain.  That alone should give one pause to wonder whether all the “Cool Britannia” proclamations,  all the post-racial/post-national notions of ethnicity that Hall and Gilroy celebrated, even D’Aguiar’s hopeful assertion that creativity and imagination ought to be able to take us beyond color—whether all that sort of thinking might have been a bit premature.  Many of you have already figured out that even if we expose race as an illusory concept that has long outlived its usefulness, even if we declare identity to be a matter of cross-pollination and syncretism and individual imagination, those declarations don’t necessarily change facts on the ground—not entirely, anyway.  There are still public figures calling for the expulsion of “immigrants” who won’t conform to “British” culture, for instance—and such calls have only intensified in past decade (and especially in the past few years, when Britain, like the rest of Europe, has seen an astounding influx of refugees).  British cities still periodically erupt in riots—usually in “Asian” neighborhoods now, among people who feel embattled and oppressed, alienated from and hated by their white neighbors—although the August 2011 riots were much more racially ecumenical.  Predictably, years of austerity policies brought on by the implosion of global capitalism have only exacerbated things.  Not surprising, then, that a lot of people of color in Britain have the uncomfortable feeling, as Diran Adebayo put it in a 2001 piece on the “Afterword” page, that “there’s [still] a war on,” and that race is still something you can die for and be killed for.

So…is that all there is?  That’s what Linton Kwesi Johnson wanted to know, too, as he looked back upon Black Britain’s trajectory fully twenty-five years ago.  Sure, he said, we’ve got black MPs (Members of Parliament) and (JPs) Justices of the Peace, “blacks pan di radio, blacks pan tee vee,” black Sirs and Lords and MBEs (Members of the British Empire, an honorific title bestowed by the Queen).  But was that it?  Is that what black people had been fighting for?  And was the fight now over?  Were black folks now supposed to move on, forget the past, and each person work out their own answer from there on out?  That’s what the speaker of the poem wonders in the penultimate stanza. And then he shrugs his shoulders and punts: “Sometimes the pungent odor of decay / Signals brand new life on the way.”  What do you think?