scholarly journals Institutional renewal and reform: the challenge of the Commonwealth of Nations

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
The Hon. Michael Kirby
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Renewal ◽  
Commonwealth Of Nations

Migrant Fiction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. L. Innes
Keyword(s):  
Professional Training ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
World War One ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
British And Irish Literature ◽  
Commonwealth Of Nations ◽  
British Commonwealth ◽  
British Commonwealth Of Nations ◽  
Second World

This chapter discusses migrant fiction in British and Irish literature. The end of the Second World War and the closing stages of the British empire brought significant changes, making more complex the ambivalent attitudes of the British towards the peoples of what now became (in 1948) the British Commonwealth of Nations. As it was gradually acknowledged that the expatriate professional and administrative classes in the former empire would be replaced by indigenous persons, increasingly large numbers were sent from the colonies to acquire the British professional training and higher education often required for an appointment in their home countries. It is in this context that migrant fiction, both by and about immigrant communities, was created in Britain in the decades immediately following the Second World War. One response to the disorientation experienced in Britain was to recreate the community back home, to rediscover and understand what one had left.

Nationality within the British Commonwealth of Nations

1931 ◽  
Vol 44 (6) ◽  
pp. 1018
Author(s):  
Richard W. Flournoy ◽  
E. F. W. Gey van Pittius
Keyword(s):  
Commonwealth Of Nations ◽  
British Commonwealth ◽  
British Commonwealth Of Nations

The Booker Prize and Post-Imperial British Literature

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Holmes
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
British Literature ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Commonwealth Of Nations ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
British Colonies

In the particular and peculiar case of the Booker Prize, regarded as the most prestigious literary award in the United Kingdom (as measured by economic value to the author and publisher, and total audience for the awards announcement), the cultural and economic valences of literary prizes collide with the imperial history of Britain, and its after-empire relationships to its former colonies. From its beginnings, the Booker prize has never been simply a British prize for writers in the United Kingdom. The Booker’s reach into the Commonwealth of Nations, a loose cultural and economic alliance of the United Kingdom and former British colonies, challenges the very constitution of the category of post-imperial British literature. With a history of winners from India, South Africa, New Zealand, and Nigeria, among many other former British colonies, the Booker presents itself as a value arbitrating mechanism for a majority of the English-speaking world. Indeed, the Booker has maintained a reputation for bringing writers from postcolonial nations to the attention of a British audience increasingly hungry for a global, cosmopolitan literature, especially one easily available via the lingua franca of English. Whether and how the prize winners avoid the twin colonial pitfalls of ownership by and debt to an English patron is the subject of a great deal of criticism on the Booker, and to understand the prize as a gatekeeper and tastemaker for the loose, baggy canon of British or even global Anglophone literature, there must be a reckoning with the history of the prize, its multiplication into several prizes under one umbrella category, and the form and substance of the novels that have taken the prize since 1969.

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