The year 1963 is special for Julio Cortázar: he publishes Rayuela (Hopscotch) and visits revolutionary Cuba. The year before one of his stories was adapted into a film (La cifra impar [Odd Number]) and, as Ángel Rama points out in his essay “El boom en perspectiva” (included in the volume Más allá del boom: literatura y mercado) the sales of his books start to increase steadily: 10,500 in 1964, 49,000 en 1967, almost 80,000 in 1969. The Rayuela phenomenon is but one in a myriad transformations that were taking place in the cultural and literary fields: the end of the chasm that had separated mass audiences from Argentinean literature, the Latin-Americanization of the intellectual and artistic fields, the transformation of the publishing industry with the rise of Editorial Sudamericana, among others (in 1962 Eudeba’s edition of Martín Fierro had become a bestseller). Starting with Rayuela and other works published those years (such as Manuel Mujica Lainez’s Bomarzo, which shared the Kennedy prize with Cortázar’s novel), this chapter questions the relationship between fiction and politics in a very troubled period of Latin American history.

This chapter attends to how the use of ‘black’ as a political aesthetic but contested signifier developed throughout the1970s and 1980s, and impacted on literary production. Partly due to such literary and political alliances, pioneering works such as the first ‘black British’ poetry collection, News for Babylon (1984), ground-breaking anthologies of women’s voices such as Watchers and Seekers (1987) or E. A. Markham’s 1989 selection of black and Caribbean poetry, Hinterland, appeared. The voices of new collectives such as the Asian Women’s Writers, Tara Arts or the Southall Black Sisters were published in the 1980s alongside periodicals like Artrage and Wasafiri which began to embed and inscribe black and Asian literary and artistic culture into Britain. This chapter explores the cultural and political landscape of this formative period and charts how these key literary and cultural initiatives opened up the borders of British writing. Discussing the difficult relations between arts sponsorship, policy-making, and creativity, the chapter explores how various pigeon-holes, whether of race, multiculturalism, or cultural diversity have at times limited understanding and serious critical appreciations of the range of black and Asian creative practice.