This chapter discusses changing conceptions of national identity as Britain entered its postcolonial phase after World War II. Structured around key moments like the attempt to reconfigure the Empire as a ’Commonwealth of Nations’, the famed 1948 arrival of the Empire Windrush with migrants from the Caribbean and the various citizenship laws passed in the wake of increasing migration from Britain’s colonial holdings, the chapter examines the work of writers who became part of the new communities settling into Britain during the post-war period. Pioneering authors E. R. Braithwaite, George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul and Sam Selvon are considered, as well as their literary inheritors, including Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jackie Kay, Hari Kunzru, Andrea Levy, Kamala Markandaya, Caryl Phillips and Benjamin Zephaniah. Ultimately, the chapter reveals how literature has both registered and assertively renegotiated the still incomplete evolution towards a more ecumenical sense of Britishness.

An increase in the numbers of people migrating to Ireland in the 1990s spurred a parallel interest in literary representations of a new multicultural Ireland. Until very recently, such representations have been predominantly authored by white Irish writers. In this chapter, I instead focus on fiction and poetry produced in the last decade by migrant writers of colour in Ireland. The perspective afforded in this work is not simply an add-on to the already existing body of literary work about ‘multicultural Ireland’. Rather, it is, among other things, a corrective to the centring of the dominant white ‘native’ point of view on the ‘migrant other’. In the last decade, and particularly in the last few years, migrant writers of colour are breaking through into the literary and cultural mainstream with work that centres migrant of colour consciousness and, particularly in the case of young emerging artists, that experiments with form, genre, and medium in ways that circumvent established literary norms and circuits of exchange.