London Calling - How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City

''London Calling'' tells the story of black and Asian literary London, tracing the escapades, fortune making, and self-expansion of these forgotten writers. It is a joyful and often rapturous work, a love letter to the capital, a teeming and complex mix of social and cultural history seen through the imagination and experience of great black and Asian writers. ''London Calling'' gets to the heart of the immigration impulse, and evokes the dreams and adventures of those who have sought refuge and asylum in the cradle of Empire. The book is populated by runaway slaves, lotharios, imams, boxer-pimps, rajahs and colonial revolutionaries, and discusses writers as diverse in style and time as the 18th-century grocer-aesthete Ignatius Sancho right through to Rushdie, Kureishi and yardie chronicler Victor Headley. The result is an exciting work, brimming with life, as it spotlights a rich but neglected literary tradition, and brings to life a gaping void in the city''s history. Placing the multiculturalism of today''s capital in its historical context, Sukhdev Sandhu shows that it is no new phenomenon, and that just as London has been the making of many black writers, they too have been the making of London.

Product details

• Authors: Sukhdev Sandhu, Sandhu Sukhdev
• Publisher: Harper Perennial UK
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 01.11.2004
• EAN: 9780006532149
• ISBN: 978-0-00-653214-9
• Dimensions: 129 mm x 198 mm x 34 mm
• Series: History of Black London
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History; Non-fiction book > Politics, society, business > Politics; Social sciences, law, business > Ethnology > Ethnology; London, Greater London, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Popular Culture, Cultural Studies, Biography: literary, European History, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Emigration & Immigration, Social & cultural history, British & Irish history, Social and cultural history, Literary studies: post-colonial literature, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Urban communities, Biography: writers, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Discrimination, Literary studies: postcolonial literature, Decolonisation and postcolonial studies