Postcolonial Manchester: Diaspora Space and the Devolution of Literary Culture

Postcolonial Manchester offers a radical new perspective on Britain's devolved literary cultures by focusing on Manchester's vibrant, multicultural literary scene. Referencing Avtar Brah's concept of 'diaspora space', the authors argue that Manchester is, and always has been, a quintessentially migrant city to which workers of all nationalities and cultures have been drawn since its origins in the cotton trade and the expansion of the British Empire. This colonial legacy - and the inequalities upon which it turns - is a recurrent motif in the texts and poetry performances of the contemporary Mancunian writers featured here, many of them members of the city's long-established African, African-Caribbean, Asian, Chinese, Irish and Jewish diasporic communities. By turning the spotlight on Manchester's rich, yet under-represented, literary tradition in this way, Postcolonial Manchester also argues for the devolution of the canon of English Literature and, in particular, recognition for contemporary black and Asian literary culture outside of London. The book is organised around those predominant literary modes that have dominated Manchester's literary scene over the past forty years: namely, crime fiction, mixed-genre anthologies and 'poetry in performance'. In addition, it seeks to capture Manchester's distinctive postcolonial identity through a wide-ranging exploration of its history, literature and popular culture, while exploring the challenges involved in publishing Manchester's black and Asian writers. Throughout the volume, the discussion is concerned with the production and consumption of the texts as well as their subject matter. The book concludes by detailing in-depth interviews with several of the writers featured elsewhere in the volume. This book will be of interest to students and scholars working in the fields of contemporary literary and postcolonial studies, as well as general readers with an interest in Manchester.