from second-generation immigrants such as Hanif Kureishi. The multi-cultural
contribution to current writing in English is increasingly reflected, on social as well
as aesthetic grounds, in the syllabus at schools and colleges. Among talented younger
writers in this genre are Monica Ali, the author ofBrick Lane, and Zadie Smith, who,
like Rushdie, took a First in English from King’s College, Cambridge. Zadie Smith’s
mother was a Jamaican immigrant, her father a Jew. Her White Teeth(2000) paro-
dies cultural and multi-cultural stereotypes of class, race and gender. Her On Beauty
(2005) is a homage to E. M. Forster’s Howards End, dealing satirically with multicul-
tural issues, notably the problems of affirmative action in a university in Boston. She
is happy to play on the metropolitan field of Martin Amis and Julian Barnes.
British cities, like other cities, are multicultural. There are settled immigrant
communities, transient workers and asylum seekers. The literature of incoming
groups has for some decades been promoted under a government policy designed to
increase inter-communal understanding. England likes to think of itself as liberal to
refugees: it has welcomed French Protestants, French Catholics, Marx, Freud,
African political exiles. The arrival in 1840s Britain of scores of thousands of Queen
Victoria’s Irish subjects was, however, resented. The scale of recent immigration,
followed by the bombings of British citizens by fellow Britons identifying themselves
as Muslims, has brought to the boil a problem of any mixed society: the conflict
between the rights of incoming minorities, whether racial, cultural or religious, with
those of the majority, a conflict which has to be decided by the law of the land in the
interest of the common good.
The official recognition and protection of minority cultures was called ‘multi-
culturalism’, a word referring not to the fact that there are many cultures in the UK,
but to a policy, the policy of protection for the culture and civil rights of incomers.
This policy sought to combat prejudice and to allow cultures (their diet, their mari-
tal customs,their religion) to continue. The public was largely tolerant or indiffer-
ent, but there were tensions over jobs and housing, and an informal segregation.
THE EMPIRE OF FICTION 425Some Commonwealth writers read in Britain or writing in
Britain, by place of origin
Nirad C. Chaudhuri (b.India, 1897–1999)
Mulk Raj Anand (b.India, 1905–2004)
R. K. Narayan (b.India, 1906–2001)
Attia Hosain (b.Sialkot, India, now Pakistan,
1913–1998)
Zulfikhar Ghose (b.Pakistan, 1935)
Anita Desai (b.India, 1937)
Arundhati Roy (b.India, 1961)
Wilson Harris (b.Guyana, 1921)
Sam Selvon (b.Trinidad, 1923)
George Lamming (b.Barbados, 1927)
V. S. Naipaul (b.Trinidad, 1932)
E. A. Markham (b.Monserrat, 1939–2008)
Caryl Phillips (b.St Kitts, 1958)
Fred D’Aguiar (b.Guyana, 1960)Chinua Achebe (b.Nigeria, 1930)
Ngugi wa Thiongo (b.Kenya, 1938)
Ben Okri (b.Nigeria, 1959)
Patrick White (b.England, 1912; Australian,
d.1990)
David Malouf (b.Australia, 1934)
Peter Carey (b.Australia, 1943)
Tim Winton (b.Australia, 1960)
Robertson Davies (b.Canada, 1913–95)
Carol Shields (b.USA, lived in Canada,
1935–2003)
Margaret Atwood (b.Canada, 1939)
Michael Ondaatje (b.Canada, 1943)