He gave this interview the same day that a small group British Muslim extremists burned the Union Jack outside the Central Mosque in Regent’s Park. What we should be talking about is how we reach an integrated society, one in which people are equal under the law, where there are some common values” (“Britain ‘must’”). He added: “We are now in a different world from the Sixties and Seventies. In an interview with the Times (London) published on 2 April 2004, Trevor Phillips, a former champion of multiculturalism and head of the Commission on Racial Equality, said that the 40-year policy of multiculturalism was out of date and no longer useful because it “now means the wrong things” and encourages 'separateness' among communities. For all three writers London becomes what John Clement Ball has called “a semi-detached signifier: it is and is not Britain it is and is not the world” (9).īritish attitudes to multiculturalism have been changing again recently, partly as an after effect of 9/11. These three writers only know a London characterized by multiculturalism and residual racism. All of them differ from their postcolonial predecessors who could still remember their countries of origin and who remained ambivalent about their identity and allegiances. All three writers celebrate the increasingly multicultural nature of London’s inhabitants. This new subgenre became so much in demand in the 1990s that both Smith and Ali were offered contracts with large advances before they had written more than a few chapters of the novels and still managed to receive highly favorable notices from most reviewers. While its most celebrated work remains White Teeth, a recent notable addition to the genre has been Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003). Readers are clearly willing to make a similar assumption judging from the large sales of this new form of fiction.

His protagonists are Londoners of mixed ethnic parentage like himself whom he takes to be “representative of the movements and aspirations of millions of people” ( Borderline 4).

This latest instance of postcolonial British fiction originated with the publication of Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia in 1990. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) belongs to a relatively recent subgenre in which children of mixed white and non-white immigrant parents represent as a given a London that is populated by a bewildering mix of cultures, religions, languages and previous nationalities.

Roth l Rushdie l Self l Smith l Winterson Email: l Amis l Barnes l Beckett l Carter l Finney l Ishiguro l McEwan l Mitchell l Mo

Joyce chalfen