Cultures in the Contact Zone: Ethnic Semiosis in Black British Literature

by Susanne Reichl

Black British writing, as a branch of postcolonial cultural production, has made a considerable impact on the contemporary literary scene. The starting point of this study is the programmatic 'contact zone', a topos of transcultural and multilingual encounter. The spatial contact zone of post-WWII Britain has engendered literary contact zones, Black British novels, which often focus on the meeting of cultures and languages. As an alternative and a supplement to purely thematic approaches to Black British writing, this study offers a model of ethnic semiosis and proposes a methodology which brings together postcolonial ideology, reader reception theory, semiotics, film studies, cultural theory, sociolinguistics and translation studies. This forms the basis for a cross-section analysis of more than 30 Black British novels and in-depth analyses of eight selected novels that demonstrate the potential and the versatility of the proposed framework and analytical tools.

239 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2002