David Dabydeen

David Dabydeen’s Turner is a long narrative poem written in response to J. M. W. Turner’s celebrated poem “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying.” Dabydeen’s poem focuses on what is hidden in Turner’s painting, the submerged head of the drowning African. In inventing a biography and the drowned man’s unspoken desires, the poem brings into confrontation the wish for renewal and the inescapable stains of history, including the meaning of Turner’s painting.

New and Selected Poems

Turner

Maria del Pilar Kaladeen

Professor of Music Tina K Ramnarine

To mark the centenary of the abolition of indenture in the British Empire (2017-2020), a groundbreaking new anthology brings together writing by descendants of indentured labourers from across the Commonwealth. Through the mediums of poetry, short stories and essays, the book explores - for the first time - the controversial legacy of indenture.

Writings from the Descendants of Indenture

We Mark Your Memory

Tina K Ramnarine

The history and legacy of Indian and Chinese Caribbean indentured labourers who were part of the Windrush generation

Legacies of Indenture in Britain's Caribbean Empire

The Other Windrush

Disappearance

A HARLOT'S PROGRESS reinvents William Hogarth's famous painting of 1732 which tells the story of a whore, a Jewish merchant, a magistrate and a quack doctor bound together by sexual and financial greed. Dabydeen's novel endows Hogarth's characters with alternative potential lives, redeeming them for their cliched status as predators or victims. The protagonist - in Hogarth, a black slave boy, in Dabydeen, London's oldest black inhabitant - is forced to tell his story to the Abolitionists in return for their charity. He refuses however to supply parade of grievances, and to give a simplistic account of beatings, sexual abuses, etc. He will not embark upon yet another fictional journey into the dark nature of slavery for the voyeuristic delight of the English reader. Instead, the old man ties the reader up in knots as deftly as a harlot her client: he spins a tale of myths, half-truths and fantasies; recreating Africa and eighteenth-century London in startlingly poetic ways. What matters to him is the odyssey into poetry, the rich texture of his narrative, not its truthfulness. In this, his fourth novel, David Dabydeen opens up history to myriad imaginary interpretations, repopulating a vanished world with a strange, defiantly vivid and compassionate humanity.

A Harlot's Progress

Slave Song

Brinsley Samaroo

India in the Caribbean

Paul Edwards

Containing extracts from all the major Afro-British writers and many early Black American, West African and Caribbean writers who spent time in Britain, this anthology is a sparkling introduction to the rich tradition of Black British writing. A general introduction to the anthology discusses the beginnings of Black literature in Britain during the period of Abolition. Each author in the anthology also has an individual introduction which briefly examines the author and the period in which he or she was writing, as well as the extract itself. The anthology is drawn from autobiographies, slave narratives, unpublished letters, oral accounts and public records, and represents the work of people such as Equiano, Cugoano, Sancho, Gronniosaw, Robert Wedderburn, James Africanus Horton, Mary Prince, Mary Seacole, Harriet Jacobus, Edward Wilmot Blyden and John E. Ocansey.

Black Writers in Britain, 1760-1890

A boy is twelve when he leaves his village in Guyana for England, where he strives for an education at the cost of ignoring his former life.

The Intended

Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art

Hogarth's Blacks

Tributes in Verse and Prose

Cheddi Jagan

Set in the middle of last century, at the height of the Empire this book follows the lives of Rohini and Vidia, growing up and getting married in a small Indian village, before being seduced by tales of the promised land and the riches they will find there.

The Counting House

John Gilmore

Cecily Jones

A unique A-Z guide to the history of black people in the British Isles from classical times to the present day. With entries for landmark figures (e.g. Mary Seacole, Crimean nurse), key events (the Brixton Riots), concepts (Emancipation), and historical accounts. Wide-ranging coverage from medicine and warfare to art, music, sport, and education.

David Dabydeen

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