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Bettina Jansen

NARRATIVES OF
COMMUNITY IN
THE BLACK BRITISH
SHORT STORY
 Narratives of Community in the Black British
Short Story

“Jansen’s new book is a brilliant critical response to the social and cultural
­transformations in contemporary Britain, providing a rigorous critical answer to
the urge of posing solutions to social conflict. Covering a wide range of authors,
here Jansen articulates the first systematic analysis of the black British short story
through the adequate lens of postcolonial and philosophical concepts of commu-
nity in what stands out as an essential thorough examination of both “black British
literature” and the short story, thus constituting an illuminating contribution to
the field.”
—Laura Mª Lojo-Rodríguez, Senior Lecturer in English,
University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and coeditor of
Gender and Short Fiction: Women’s Tales
in Contemporary Britain (2018)
 Bettina Jansen

Narratives
of Community
in the Black British
Short Story
Bettina Jansen
TU Dresden
Dresden, Germany

ISBN 978-3-319-94859-1 ISBN 978-3-319-94860-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94860-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018947412

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
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now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
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 Acknowledgements

This book began life as a Ph.D. thesis at TU Dresden, Germany.

Therefore, I owe my thanks to the community of scholars at the uni-
versity’s English Department of which I have been a part. My supervi-
sor Stefan Horlacher gave me the freedom to follow my fascination with
British short story writing and to make the black British short story
the main subject of my academic research. He encouraged me to work
towards an innovative theoretical framework and offered helpful advice
along the way. Moreover, I am grateful for the opportunity to discuss
my findings with the participants in the Department’s postgraduate
colloquium, and I am indebted to the questions, suggestions, and reas-
surances from my colleagues and friends at the Department, especially
Mirjam Frotscher, Christina Kegel, Andrea Kiel, Ulrike Kohn, Thomas
Kühn, Wieland Schwanebeck, Robert Troschitz, and Gesine Wegner.
My expertise in the field of short story research has been crucially
shaped by my membership in the Society for the Study of the Short
Story in English, and the European Network for Short Fiction Research.
I am particularly obliged to the inspiration, encouragement, and sup-
port I received from Laura Lojo-Rodríguez (University of Santiago de
Compostela). Furthermore, my research has profited from its critical dis-
cussion at a number of international conferences; I would like to thank
especially Hywel Dix (Bournemouth University) and Elke D’hoker (KU
Leuven) for their insightful criticism and recommendations for fur-
ther reading. In the final stages of preparing this book, I have greatly

v
vi    Acknowledgements

benefited from the advice and support I received from Mita Choudhury
(Purdue University).
My thanks are also due to the staff of the Saxon State and University
Library Dresden, who knowledgeably and patiently helped me trace sin-
gle short stories in diverse newspapers and magazines at the outset of my
research, and Allie Troyanos and Rachel Jacobe at Palgrave Macmillan,
whose professionalism made the publication of my findings an enjoyable
experience.
Last but not least, I would like to thank my parents Susanne and
Gernoth Schötz for awakening my love of literature and sparking my
enthusiasm for British culture, and for encouraging me to pursue
these interests academically. My sister Juliane Weidmüller and her fam-
ily helped me not to forget the life outside of fiction. And my husband
Sebastian and our son Johann have brought so much joy into my life and
have shown great patience as I completed this book.
 Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Theories of Community 35

Part I The Early Black British Short Story, c 1950–1980

3 The West Indian Immigrant Community: Samuel Selvon 67

4 The Emergence of a Black British Community:

Farrukh Dhondy 89

Part II Hanif Kureishi and the Black British Short Story

since the 1980s

5 “A New Way of Being British”: Kureishi’s ‘Ethnic’

Short Stories 117

6 Human Commonalities: Kureishi’s ‘Postethnic’

Short Stories 131

vii
viii    Contents

Part III The Local Black British Short Story since the 1990s

7 Scottish Singular Plurality: Jackie Kay 153

8 Scottish Community between Essence

and (De-)Construction: Suhayl Saadi 185

9 Accidental Englishness: Zadie Smith 207

Part IV The Cosmopolitan Black British Short Story

since the 1990s

10 Tour du Monde: Hari Kunzru 257

11 The World as Singular Plural Composite: Suhayl Saadi 279

12 Conclusion 309

Index 325
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The question of community, the question of how we want to live

together, is one of the crucial questions of our times. Our contemporary
era is shaped by struggles over race relations and concepts of community.
Although migration, cross-cultural exchange, and transnational coopera-
tion have become inherent aspects of our globalised lives, growing num-
bers of migrants as well as political refugees lead to periodic eruptions of
racist and nationalist sentiments in many countries across the world. In
Postcolonial Melancholia, Paul Gilroy warningly notes a global resurgence
of “patriotism and ethnic-absolutism” (2005, 65). In Britain, too, the
increase in Islamist terrorist attacks and the perceived threat of uncon-
trollable immigration have resulted in a racist backlash. The historic
Brexit referendum was arguably won by an Islamophobic and anti-
immigration leave campaign that revived the myth of a quintessentially
white, monocultural, and homogeneous ‘British culture’. As a conse-
quence, more than half of the British population feel that “ethnic minor-
ities [threaten] their ‘culture’” (Hirsch 2017) and have become hostile
towards both newly arriving refugees and British-born minorities.
What populist and nationalist evocations of an ‘original’ ethno-racial
community conceal, however, is that human history is a history of migration
and that the nation-states in their presently existing forms are fairly recent
‘inventions’ (see Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Anderson [1983] 1991). As
early as in 1701, Daniel Defoe reminds his fellow countrymen that there
is no “True-Born Englishman,” for “from a Mixture of all Kinds began,/
That Het’rogeneous Thing, An Englishman” ([1701] 1974, 42–43).

© The Author(s) 2018 1

B. Jansen, Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94860-7_1
2 B. JANSEN

The right-wing notion of a hereditary and eternal English or British national

community is a fabricated fiction, the myth of “community as essence”
(Nancy [1986] 1991, xxxviii). Nevertheless, traditional, essence-based
notions of community have real-life consequences for those excluded,
who suffer from discrimination, violence, and, in extreme cases, systematic
persecution.
In order to arrive at new, peaceful, and respectful paradigms of liv-
ing together, it is necessary to deconstruct conventional conceptions of
community that associate a sense of belonging with a shared territorial,
ethno-racial, and/or spiritual essence. The thinking of community, the
French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy argues,

can no longer be a matter of figuring or modeling a communitarian

essence in order to present it to ourselves and to celebrate it, but […] it is
a matter rather of thinking community […] beyond communitarian mod-
els or remodelings. ([1986] 1991, 22)

What is at stake, then, is a redefinition of “[t]he very concepts of homo-

geneous national cultures […] or ‘organic’ ethnic communities” (Bhabha
[1994] 2004, 6–8). We need to rethink existing social and cultural for-
mations in order to replace the traditional ideology of homogeneity
and ethno-racial as well as cultural purity with an acknowledgement of
heterogeneity and a general openness towards others. Ultimately, the
postcolonial critic Homi K. Bhabha rightly argues, refugees just like post-
colonial migrants, diasporic peoples, and exiles are currently initiating “a
radical revision in the concept of human community itself” (ibid., 8).
Literature plays an important role in this deconstruction of preva-
lent notions of community because literature, Nancy stresses, “[opens]
community to itself” ([1986] 1991, 80). By inscribing community’s
“infinite resistance to everything that would bring it to completion,” lit-
erature exposes alternative, non-essentialist models of community (ibid.,
81). The black British writer and critic Caryl Phillips, too, points to the
immense potential that literature holds for a renegotiation of commu-
nity. In his essay “Colour Me English” (2011), he calls for an inclusion-
ary and polycultural1 understanding of British and European community,
urging us to “remind ourselves of the lesson that great fiction teaches
us as we sink into character and plot and suspend our disbelief: for
a moment, ‘they’ are ‘us’” (16). Literature encourages us to change
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

perspectives and relate to the supposed other, discovering that they are
not so different from ourselves but, in fact, “fellow human beings” (17).
Phillips emphasises that “[a]s long as we have literature as a bulwark
against intolerance, and as a force for change, then we have a chance”
(16). Not only does fiction possess “the moral capacity […] to wrench us
out of our ideological burrows and force us to engage with […] a world
that is peopled with individuals we might otherwise never meet in our
daily lives,” but “literature is [also] plurality in action” (ibid.). It presents
various characters and gives voice to their thoughts and feelings without
judging or even ranking them. Ultimately, Phillips argues, literary texts
“[implore] us to act with a compassion born of familiarity towards our
fellow human beings, be they Christian, Jew, Muslim, black, brown or
white” (16–17).
The German literary theorist and cultural critic Ottmar Ette sim-
ilarly argues that literary texts store a wealth of “knowledge for living
together” (2010, 989). He contends that “[t]he time is right to under-
stand literary scholarship as a science for living together” (991). Ette
urges literary scholars to use their analytical access to literary storehouses
of knowledge in order to partake actively in the contemporary discourse
about “how radically different cultures might live together” (983). He
states:

Although the literatures of the world have always been concerned with
knowledge for living together, literary scholars have yet to mine this
resource in any extensive and systematic fashion. Nor have they contrib-
uted any of this knowledge to recent public debates on the subject of
life. But literary criticism and critical theory should be at the forefront
of such discussions as we face the most important, and at the same time
riskiest, challenge of the twenty-first century: the search for paradigms of
coexistence that would suggest ways in which humans might live together
in peace and with mutual respect for one another’s differences. (989)

Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story responds to

Ette’s appeal in a number of ways. The book conducts an “extensive
and systematic” study of the “paradigms of coexistence” that contempo-
rary black British short fiction explores. Indeed, black British literature
seems to be of particular relevance at the present moment. Produced
by writers who are themselves in one way or another part of an earlier
wave of mass immigration to Europe, namely the postwar migration
4 B. JANSEN

from the Commonwealth to Britain, black British writing has reima-

gined community and suggested new models of social possibility since its
beginnings in the 1950s. We will see that the specific form of the black
British short story has proved particularly innovative in the experimen-
tation with alternative kinds of communal belonging. By foreground-
ing black British short fiction’s profound knowledge for living together
across cultural differences, this book wishes, as Ette demands, to con-
tribute to the public discourse on respectful, just, and peaceful ways of
communal living in Britain and beyond.

1  The Term ‘Black British Literature’

Any discussion of black British writing must start with a reflection on
the term ‘black British literature’ because it has been disputed by writ-
ers and critics alike and has come to mean very different things. Authors
like Salman Rushdie and Fred D’Aguiar early on warned that the term
tends to marginalise the writers thus categorised “in […] relation to
what might be called ‘white British literature’” (Ledent 2009, 16) and to
restrict them in the choice of their subject matter (Rushdie 1987, 37–38;
McLeod 2006, 95). More recent criticism points to the term’s overgen-
eralisation of the writers’ cultural diversity and its failure to “allow for
full consideration of individual ethnic identities” (Upstone 2010, 2; see
Arana 2009, xviii). Accordingly, several scholars differentiate between
‘black British’ literature penned by writers of African and Afro-Caribbean
descent, and ‘British Asian’ or ‘Asian British’ literature written by
authors of Asian or Indo-Caribbean descent (cf. Nasta 2002; Ellis 2007;
Innes 2008; Upstone 2010).
In contrast to such a racial conception of ‘black’ as denoting a writer’s
African heritage, I understand black in the British context as a political
and cultural term. Following scholars like Procter (2003), Stein (2004),
Arana (2007), and McLeod (2010), I use ‘black British literature’ as a
highly inclusive and heterogeneous category that refers to texts by “writ-
ers with African, South Asian, Indo-Caribbean, and African-Caribbean
backgrounds (backgrounds which could be further subdivided)” (Stein
2004, xiv). Such a wide understanding of black is indebted to the term’s
original usage as a “unifying framework” (Hall [1989] 1996, 441) for
Britain’s non-white population in their fight against racism (see Gilroy
[1987] 1995, 230, 236). My conception of black, then, acknowledges,
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

as Procter demands, black British literature’s “political, positional his-

tory” (2003, 10). Moreover, my broad definition of the term allows
for a comparative, transcultural approach to the short fiction originat-
ing from various non-white British backgrounds. It is only when “Asian
and African-Caribbean literature [are considered] collectively as a com-
munity of black writings” that the “rhetorical and intertextual relations”
(Procter 2003, 10) existing between these texts can be explored. In
order to distinguish my political and inclusive understanding of black,
which is unique to the British context, from the racial connotations that
the term carries in African American literary and cultural studies, black is
spelt with a lower-case initial throughout this monograph (cf. Low and
Wynne-Davies 2006, 3).

2   Black British Literature, Culture, and Politics

since 1948

This book does not consider black British short story writing in isolation,
but is interested in the cultural work that these short stories are doing
and seeks to outline their contribution to the contemporary discourse on
community. Therefore, it seems necessary to sketch the historical, polit-
ical, and cultural context in which black British literature has been pro-
duced in the second half of the twentieth and at the beginning of the
twenty-first centuries.
Historical evidence suggests that the history of black life in Britain
already begins with the Roman invasion in AD 43 when African soldiers
came to the island as part of the Roman armies (Innes 2008, 7). Yet, it is
the arrival of 492 West Indians on the SS Empire Windrush in 1948 that
marks a watershed in black British history. The Empire Windrush signals
the beginning of large-scale immigration from, above all, the Caribbean
Islands, Africa, and South East Asia. Following recruitment campaigns
from successive British postwar governments (Green 1990, 3; Innes
2008, 180–181), an unprecedented number of Commonwealth immi-
grants arrived in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s. Many migrants
readily embraced the British offer to fill empty jobs in the British textile,
shipbuilding, and automobile industries as well as the transport, health,
and postal services (Korte and Sternberg 1997, 17–18; Innes 2008, 180)
because it provided them with an escape from poverty, unemployment,
and political unrest in their newly independent home countries.
6 B. JANSEN

In 1951 the Caribbean and South Asian population in Britain

amounted to eighty thousand people, by 1971 it had already grown to
1.5 million.2 Within the next twenty years, it further increased to just
over three million people (Paxman 1999, 72). According to the 2011
Census for England and Wales, the last two decades again saw a con-
siderable rise in ethnic minority population: eight million people or 14%
of the population identify themselves either as belonging to ‘mixed or
multiple ethnic groups’, or as being ‘Asian’ or ‘Asian British’, ‘black’,
‘African’, ‘Caribbean’, or ‘black British’, or as belonging to any other
non-white ethnic group (ONS 2012). While Britain has become
“the most multiracial of European countries” (Phillips 2011, 216),
there are considerable geographical differences. The vast majority of
Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants live in the West
Midlands and the southeast of England (Paxman 1999, 73), with
London being the most ethnically diverse city in the UK (ONS 2012).
In Northern England, the West Yorkshire cities Leeds and Bradford but
also Manchester and Sheffield have significant BME populations, too (cf.
Elevation Networks 2016, 2). Conversely, Commonwealth immigrants
are “comparatively absent from Scotland and Wales” (Paxman 1999,
73; cf. ONS 2012). At present, more people of Commonwealth descent
are being born in Britain than migrate there, growing up as second- and
third-generation children of immigrants (Döring 2008, 164).
The substantial growth in ethnic minority population within a rela-
tively short amount of time has caused increasing racial tensions from
the very beginning, which have regularly culminated in violent race riots.
Commonwealth immigrants have suffered from discrimination in terms
of housing and employment,3 as well as open and concealed forms of
institutional racism. In his essay “The New Empire within Britain”
(1982), Rushdie argues that “every major institution in this country is
permeated by racial prejudice to some degree” ([1982] 1992, 134). He
famously observes:

It sometimes seems that the British authorities, no longer capable of

exporting governments, have chosen instead to import a new Empire, a
new community of subject peoples of whom they think, and with whom
they can deal, in very much the same way as their predecessors thought of
and dealt with “the fluttered folk and wild,” the “new-caught, sullen peo-
ples, half-devil and half-child,” who made up, for Rudyard Kipling, the
White Man’s Burden. (130)
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

Rushdie succinctly expresses the pervasiveness of racial prejudice in the

1980s when he contends that “Britain is now two entirely different
worlds, and the one you inhabit is determined by the colour of your
skin” (134). That this situation had not changed one decade later was
officially acknowledged by the Macpherson Report (1999). This report
enquired into the murder of eighteen-year-old Stephen Lawrence in
1993 and the seemingly half-hearted attempts of Scotland Yard to give
first aid to the victim and to solve the crime. The Macpherson Report
publicly denounced the police services and the criminal justice system as
prone to institutional racism (ch. 47; Colls 2002, 179–180).
At the beginning of the new millennium, race relations reached a new
crisis in the summer of 2001 when several violent riots erupted in the
Northern cities of Oldham, Burnley, and Bradford (Smyth 2007, 223).
Following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and particularly 7/7, there
has been a drastic increase in Islamophobia that has resulted in
discrimination and institutional racism against British Muslims (Hasan
2015). The more recent IS terror attacks in Europe have exacerbated
this anti-Muslim sentiment in Britain, and since 2009 several far-right,
Islamophobic, and xenophobic movements have been formed like the
English Defence League (EDL), Pegida UK, or the party Britain First.
The Institute of Race Relations (IRR) describes the current extent of
racial inequality, discrimination, and institutional racism thus:

In the twenty years since the death of Stephen Lawrence, we can report
that 106 people have lost their lives in […] racist attacks […], that black
people are twenty-eight times more likely than white to be stopped and
searched by the police […], that in 2009/10 black people were over three
times more likely than white to be arrested, that black and those of mixed
ethnicity are over twice as likely as whites to be unemployed, that three
quarters of 7-year-old Pakistani and Bangladeshi children are living in pov-
erty compared to one in four whites, and that those classifying themselves
as ‘Other Black’ are six times more likely than average to be admitted as
mental health inpatients. (IRR 2013)

In the aftermath of the Brexit referendum in 2016, the number of hate

crimes and racist attacks soared to new dimensions (Dodd 2016), and
the persistent structural disadvantagement of ethnic minorities came to
the fore of public debates once again. Had the black British writer Hanif
Kureishi, like many others, celebrated Britain previously as “a cultural
8 B. JANSEN

force in Europe […] because of [its] multiculturalism and diversity”

(quoted in McCrum 2014), one year after the referendum he worriedly
observes the development of an “utterly misconceived and misplaced and
vile” form of racism and Islamophobia, concluding that the middle class
“[is] more racist than [it] [has] ever been” (quoted in Clark 2017). The
black British writer Jackie Kay similarly notes “a lurch to xenophobia”
and a “very worrying insularity and racism” (quoted in Brooks 2016) in
contemporary Britain.
Until the 1990s, British politics had responded to racial tensions
mainly by passing Immigration Acts intended to reduce the number of
Commonwealth immigrants and by implementing Race Relations Acts
that made discrimination unlawful (cf. Green 1990, 408–409; Korte and
Sternberg 1997, 19–20; BBC 2006, 310). The most rigorous change to
civil law was implemented in 1981, when the British Nationality Act sub-
stituted the principle of the ius soli, or the allocation of citizenship by
place of birth, with the principle of partiality, thereby “discarding nine
hundred years of legal precedent” and transforming Britain into “a gene-
alogical community” (Baucom 1999, 8). Even though the Act repealed
one of the most ancient rights, “the birthright of every one of us, black
and white, and of our children and grandchildren,” it was passed with-
out arousing considerable opposition because, as Rushdie argues, it
seemed to be “expressly designed to deprive black and Asian Britons of
their citizenship rights” ([1982] 1992, 136). The atmosphere in which
the British Nationality Act was passed had been prepared, in a way, by
the infamous comments of two influential Conservative politicians. In
1968 Enoch Powell predicted in his “Rivers of Blood” Speech that mass
immigration will lead to racial violence (see Baucom 1999, 15–24), and
ten years later the future prime minister Margaret Thatcher warned that
Britain “might be rather swamped by people with a different culture”
(quoted in Korte and Sternberg 1997, 23).
Starting in 1997, New Labour introduced a radical change in the
political discourse on immigration. The party evoked Britain’s alleged tra-
dition of liberalism, tolerance, and cultural exchange in order to envision
a multicultural ‘Cool Britannia’ that celebrates cultural diversity (Paxman
1999, 238–240). In 2001 Foreign Secretary Robin Cook hailed plural-
ism in his famous “Chicken Tikka Masala” Speech as “a unique asset for
Britain in a modern world” and he urged British people to “create an
open and inclusive society that welcomes incomers for their contribu-
tion to our growth and prosperity.” Such a multicultural ‘New Britain’,
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

prime minister Tony Blair emphasised, will become “a beacon to the

world of racial equality” (quoted in Bevan and Rufford 1999, 232).
Yet, David Cameron’s speech at the Munich Security Conference
in 2011 marked a renewed change in tone. Cameron openly declared
that “the doctrine of state multiculturalism” has failed in Britain. In
the speech that coincided with one of the biggest anti-Muslim EDL
marches in England, Cameron controversially judged the condition of
British multiculturalism by focusing on British Muslim extremists only.
He attributed the increase in Islamist extremists to multiculturalism’s
“passive,” “hands-off tolerance” towards others that has “encour-
aged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and
apart from the mainstream.” He called for an “active, muscular liberal-
ism” that promotes a predefined set of British values to which all citi-
zens should adhere in order to forge a “strong society” with a “strong
identity” (Cameron 2011). By expecting ethnic minorities to assimilate
to the status quo set by white Britain, Cameron’s rhetoric effectively
referred back to the 1970s and 1980s. In the context of the Global
Financial Crisis and the severe cuts to the British welfare system, this
rhetoric fell on fertile ground. Ironically, it seems to have paved the way
for the success of the leave campaign in the 2016 referendum, which
promised ‘to get our country back’ from Europe as much as from immi-
grants and British-born ethnic minorities.
The periodic revival of racial tensions and anti-immigration sentiment
in the course of the past seventy years indicates that the ‘Windrush gen-
eration’ and its successors have posed a severe challenge to traditional
anglocentric and monocultural notions of Britishness. Already in 1982,
Rushdie astutely remarks that “Britain is undergoing a critical phase of
its postcolonial period” because it is faced with “a crisis of the whole
culture, of the society’s entire sense of itself” ([1982] 1992, 129). As
Commonwealth immigrants have visibly challenged the myth of white
Britishness, British residents have had to learn that a nation is “an
imagined political community” (Anderson [1983] 1991, 6) rather than
an essentialist given. It is a deliberate construction that functions primar-
ily through the “invention of tradition” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983),
and therefore remains continuously open to renegotiation, reinvention,
and redefinition. The difficulty of adjusting to this new conception of
nationhood has been increased by the massive changes that British
society has been undergoing in the postwar period. Internationally,
Britain ceased to be a major global player as imperial, military, and
10 B. JANSEN

manufacturing power; and it entered new alliances, becoming a member

of the European Union in 1973. But, Colls reminds us, Britain has also
faced “fundamental shifts [at home] in contemporary patterns of work,
family, authority, household, residence, region, communication” and, of
course, “ethnic and religious composition” (2002, 4).
Since its beginnings in the 1950s, black British literature and culture
have partaken in the struggle for a polycultural British society. Black
British artists have contested the prevalent understanding of Britishness
and added an entirely new perspective to the established canon of white,
anglocentric, and middle-class British art. Although “black and Asian writ-
ers […] have made a home in Britain and made their voices heard” since
1750—the earliest being Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, and Dean
Mahomed—, in A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain C.L.
Innes persuasively shows that the literature produced before 1948 does
“not so much [constitute] a tradition, as little is passed on from one writer
to the next, as a series of recurring preoccupations and tropes” (2008, 2).
Thus, the mass immigration from the Commonwealth in the wake of the
Empire Windrush heralded the beginning of a new era in the history of
black writing (ibid., 233–234). Contrary to earlier black authors who had
chiefly addressed a white British audience as individual representatives of
their cultures of origin, in the second half of the twentieth century writers
“increasingly spoke of and to a black and south Asian community within
Britain” (234). Their literary texts have been less concerned with the rec-
reation of “a community distant in time and place”; instead, they have
intended “to create [a] community here and now in Britain” (ibid.).
In its earliest phase, the 1950s and 1960s, black British literature was
predominantly written by Caribbean and Asian immigrants who “worked
their experiences of settling in London into partly autobiographical nov-
els” (Reichl 2002, 22). Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) is
a classic example of the literature produced by these writers, who were
usually single men who considered themselves transient residents in
Britain (Innes 2008, 238).
It was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that a specifically
black British identity and culture emerged, initiating the second phase
of black British literature. Against the backdrop of anti-immigration leg-
islation, particularly the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1968 and
the Immigration Act of 1971, and influenced by the US Black Power
movement, the term ‘black British’ was coined by the Caribbean Artists
Movement (Reichl 2002, 34; Stein 2004, 12). This London-based
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

group of West Indian writers and artists was instrumental to “the transi-
tion from West Indian to black British arts” (Walmsley 2010, 90). Stein
explains:

At its inception […] black British was used in an overarching sense, refer-
ring to distinct groups of West Indian migrants from Trinidad, Jamaica,
Guyana, and Barbados, etc., with distinct backgrounds. It thus included
African Guyanese, Indo-Guyanese, and Sino-Guyanese people, for exam-
ple. Later the concept was used to include migrant groups from other
parts of the world. (2004, 12)

In his seminal essay “New Ethnicities” (1989), Hall stresses that the
term ‘black’ was coined in order to reference non-white minorities’
“common experience of racism and marginalization in Britain,” and “to
provide the organising category of a new politics of resistance, among
groups and communities with, in fact, very different histories, traditions
and ethnic identities” ([1989] 1996, 441; see Gilroy [1987] 1995, 236).
Contrary to the US American context, in Britain ‘black’ thus became a
political category that united people of Caribbean, African, and Asian
descent. As such, it subverted the logic of racial discourse. Mercer
elaborates:

The rearticulation of /black/ as an empowering signifier of Afro-Asian

alliances was initially a subversive act of disarticulation in which the nodal
metaphor of racist ideology (white/non-white) was displaced out of its
fixed and centred position and appropriated into a counter-hegemonic
discourse of black community resistance. (1994, 256)

This second phase of black British literary and cultural production crit-
icised “the way blacks were positioned as the unspoken and invisible
‘other’ of predominantly white aesthetic and cultural discourses” (Hall
[1989] 1996, 441). Black artists and cultural workers demanded “access
to the rights to representation” (442) in order to become the subjects of
cultural representations of black lives. They intended to use this access
to establish “a ‘positive’ black imagery” that contests the “fetishization,
objectification and negative figuration” of images of blacks in white
British culture (ibid.). Therefore, the few artists who gained access to
British cultural discourses “[had] to carry the burden of being ‘repre-
sentative’” (Mercer 1994, 236). They were “expected to speak for the
12 B. JANSEN

black communities as if she or he were its duly appointed public ‘repre-

sentative’” (240, cf. 248). Hence, black British literature of this period
tends to portray blacks uncritically and positively in a realist aesthetic
(Procter 2004, 127, 130), adhering to the “unspoken internal impera-
tive that, as black subjects, we should never discuss our ‘differences’ in
public: that we should always defer and delay our criticism by doing our
‘dirty laundry’ in private” (Mercer 1994, 238). Dub poet Linton Kwesi
Johnson’s collections Voices of the Living and the Dead (1974), Dread
Beat an Blood (1975), and especially Inglan Is a Bitch (1980) are instruc-
tive examples of the positive, uniform, and highly politicised portrayal of
black Britons prevalent at the time.
The mid-1980s saw “a significant shift […] in black cultural politics”
(Hall [1989] 1996, 441) that ushered in a new phase of black British
cultural productivity. Functioning as a “unifying framework” in the
1970s and early 1980s, black identity had “[become] ‘hegemonic’ over
other ethnic/racial identities” (ibid.) and, in fact, had come to operate in
essentialist terms, confronting “an essentially bad white subject” with “an
essentially good black subject” (Procter 2004, 123). According to Hall,
this “innocent notion of the essential black subject” came to an end as
people became increasingly aware of the fact that “‘black’ is essentially a
politically and culturally constructed category, which cannot be grounded
in a set of fixed trans-cultural or transcendental racial categories and
which therefore has no guarantees in nature” ([1989] 1996, 443).
Accordingly, in this third phase black British literature and cultural
production are characterised by a postmodern aesthetic that questions
the notion of authenticity and reveals ‘black’ as “a discursively produced
category constructed through representation” (Procter 2004, 127). As
black British artists gained more and more access to cultural discourses,
the ‘burden of representation’ became lighter (ibid., 129) and art-
ists increasingly refused “to represent the black experience in Britain as
monolithic, self-contained, sexually stabilised and always ‘right on’—in
a word, always and only ‘positive’” (Hall [1989] 1996, 449). For, as
Rushdie argues,

the real gift which we can offer our communities is not the creation of a
set of stereotyped positive images to counteract the stereotyped negative
ones, but simply the gift of treating black and Asian characters in a way
that white writers seem very rarely able to do, that is to say as fully realised
human beings, as complex creatures, good, bad, bad, good. (1987, 41)
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

As people began to recognise “the extraordinary diversity of subjec-

tive positions, social experiences and cultural identities which compose
the category ‘black’” (Hall [1989] 1996, 443; see Gilroy [1987] 1995,
230–231), literary and cultural representations of the black British expe-
rience grew more complex. Previously marginalised speaking positions
gained visibility, including South Asian, female, feminist, and queer
perspectives. Finally, what distinguishes this phase of black British writ-
ing from earlier periods is its tremendous popularity with both reading
audiences and academia. “Suddenly,” Bhabha observes, “the intimate
lives and concerns of London’s migrants and minorities emerge as major
metropolitan themes and, in this translated terrain, they become agents
of a historic transformation,” promising that the excluded will seize a
place and time “and make it their own and yours” (2000, 142). Famous
examples of this period of black British writing include Hanif Kureishi’s
negotiation of a hybrid British Asian identity in The Buddha of Suburbia
(1990) and The Black Album (1995), as well as Jackie Kay’s transgender
novel Trumpet (1998).
In his contribution to the Wasafiri special issue on “Black Britain:
Beyond Definition” (2010), John McLeod contends that the begin-
ning of the new millennium marks the emergence of yet another phase
of black British literature. He rightly argues that black British writing of
the late twentieth century was chiefly concerned with the subjectivity
of black Britons in a multicultural society (46–48, 51). Written by sec-
ond-generation immigrants, the texts represented “the transformation
of a vexed Black British identity” (47) as an individual, solipsistic, and
diverse experience. In contrast, the literature penned after 2000 renego-
tiates “an understanding of the nation and its people that is prompted
by, but ultimately supersedes, exclusively Black British concerns” (46).
McLeod emphasises that “[m]any writers today nurture a distinctly
polycultural sense of the national that does not necessarily prioritise the
political and psychological needs of a particular constituency of (racial-
ised, black) Britons” (ibid.) but instead speaks to all Britons. According
to McLeod, post-bildungsroman novels like Diana Evans’s 26a (2005)
develop a postracial, transcultural, and deconstructive understanding of
the nation as a space characterised by sameness and singularity, stressing
the “equivalence, correspondence and resemblance” of its inhabitants,
“without denying divergence and difference” (48). Thus, mixed-race
characters do no longer function as affective, psychological portrayals
of individual experiences but personify an alternative sense of the nation
14 B. JANSEN

as a whole. They suggest “a postracial alternative to myths of racial and

national purity that is open to everyone” (49). In order to acknowl-
edge this shift “from a preoccupation of Black British identity […] to
an engagement with the identity of the UK conceived internationally
and transculturally for the benefit of all” (ibid.), McLeod coins the term
‘contemporary black writing of Britain’ (46). To him, the category ‘black
British literature’ has become unsuitable inasmuch as post-2000 writing
is no longer exclusively concerned with ‘black Britain’.
In my readings of contemporary black British short stories I, too,
trace a shift towards postracial British themes. Indeed, I will argue that
this development is observable in the black British short story from its
very beginnings in the 1950s, and with particular force since the 1980s.
What is more, I will show that contemporary black British short story
writers tend to go one step further and supersede exclusively British con-
cerns in order to pose questions of communal identity on a more gen-
eral, even ontological level. They foreground our human commonalities
and interconnectedness without, however, denying people’s singularity.
Yet, unlike McLeod, I continue to use the term ‘black British’ and dis-
cuss the texts under scrutiny here as pieces of ‘black British literature’
because I consider the emergence of a postethnic and arguably humanist
stance in the black British short story an important development within
the history of black British writing.

3  Negotiations of Community in the Short

Story Form
Through the lens of genre theory, the black British short story’s inno-
vative renegotiation of community seems hardly surprising. Short story
research suggests that the form is particularly suited to experiment with
alternative conceptions of community. Hanson regards the short story
as “the form for innovation” (quoted in Brosch 2007, 46) and Liggins,
Maunder, and Robbins concur that “short fiction offer[s] an opportunity
to explore new ways of being” (2011, 9). Many practitioners and the-
orists argue that the short story can “subvert dominant ideologies and
propose another form of discourse” (Bardolph 1988, ii) because it gives
voice to the marginal, the ex-centric, and the outsider (Liggins et al.
2011, 15). By presenting “submerged population groups” (O’Connor
[1963] 1976, 88), the short story tends to challenge prevalent notions
of communal identity.
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

Although the short story cannot be regarded as “the nonpareil form

of marginality and otherness” (Hunter 2007, 139; cf. Korte 2003, 10;
Malcolm 2012, 49), Hunter observes that “the short story is, and always
has been, disproportionately represented in the literatures of colonial
and postcolonial cultures” (2007, 138). Indeed, there appears to be a
pronounced affinity between the short story and the postcolonial condi-
tion. Various scholars contend that the form has a propensity to explore
specifically postcolonial themes like marginalisation, displacement, immi-
gration, ethnic identity, and the transnational experience.4 All of these
themes are more or less directly linked with the exploration of commu-
nity. Accordingly, Viola points out that “relationships with the commu-
nity” are of “paramount importance” (2001, xi) among the thematic
concerns of postcolonial short fiction. More precisely, March-Russell
observes that the postcolonial short story is typically characterised by a
“desire for a new social contract […], in which the acknowledgement of
all the members that constitute the territory will revise its shape” (2009,
257). Short stories written in postcolonial contexts such as postwar
Britain, then, tend to deconstruct outdated monolithic conceptions of
national identity and imagine an inclusive “social contract.”
The short story’s thematic affinity with questions of community
results from its specific formal qualities. Owing to its brevity, the short
story can be relatively quickly produced so that it is able to respond
without delay to the pressing issues of our times (cf. Hensher 2015, xxii–
xxv). As “a seismograph of our world” (Larriere 1998, 197; cf. Ingman
2009, 225–226), the short story can reflect on societal changes such as
mass immigration and the resurgence of patriotism. It can problematise
the all-too simplistic logic of Self versus Other that inevitably leads to
racial tensions, and imagine alternative, non-essentialist models of com-
munity. Since the short story is “a type of fragment” (March-Russell
2009, viii), it is not required to present a conclusive or comprehensive
vision of community but is free to experiment with various, even provi-
sional notions of human coexistence.
Due to its flexibility (Bates 1976, 74) and “limitless possibility”
(Matthews [1901] 1994, 77), the short story form invites a higher
degree of “experimentation and subversion of the norms of the main-
stream” (Liggins et al. 2011, 16) than, for instance, the novel. Its ellip-
tical and synecdochal nature (Louvel 2004, 249) allows the short story
writer simultaneously to explore a concrete example of community
on the surface level of the narrative and to allude to larger questions
16 B. JANSEN

of human coexistence on a deep-structural level. Rohrberger aptly

remarks that the short story is “philosophic at bottom” (1998, 205).
Furthermore, many short story theorists foreground the form’s quintes-
sential hybridity. The short story is of “mixed origins” (Shaw 1983, 20)5
and displays an affinity with many different literary and visual art forms.6
As such, the form seems particularly suited to negotiate non-essentialist,
heterogeneous, and inclusive models of communal belonging.
Apart from the single short story, the particular form of the short
story cycle appears to lend itself to the exploration of community. The
short story cycle presents a polyphony of voices, whereby the protagonist
of each individual story is “part of the interdependent network of the
community” (Zagarell 1988, 499) that the cycle as a whole imagines.
The story cycle thus functions as a ‘narrative of community’ (Zagarell)
that “give[s] expression to a sense of community and ethnic identity
through multiple perspectives” (Knepper 2011, 88; cf. Hestermann
2003, 28–31).

4  The Scholarly Neglect of the Black

British Short Story
The tremendous success of Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia
and, at the turn of the millennium, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000),
Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist (2002), and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane
(2003) has brought black British writing to the fore of public and aca-
demic discourses, stimulating extensive research and establishing black
British literature and culture as a field of study in its own right (see Low
and Wynne-Davies 2006, 2). Since the mid-1990s a number of mono-
graphs and essay collections on black British literature have appeared,7
which are predominately concerned with the black British novel and
occasionally consider black British poetry and theatre. However, until
now hardly any attention has been paid to the black British short story.
This seems to be partly due to the fact that research into British
short fiction is generally still at an early stage, even though the short
story currently enjoys “unprecedented” (Yentob 2014, viii) popular-
ity with British readers and publishers. Maunder emphasises that “[t]he
acknowledgment of the short story’s place in Britain’s literary history is
one of the most striking developments of recent years” (2007, v). For
a long time, American short fiction has played a pre-eminent role in
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

short story research, which, in turn, has been dominated by US schol-

ars, most famously Charles E. May, Mary Rohrberger, and Susan Lohafer
(see Lohafer 1998, x). Systematic research into British short fiction only
began after 2000. The two most comprehensive studies of the British
short story to date are Korte’s The Short Story in Britain (2003) and
Liggins, Maunder, and Robbins’s The British Short Story (2011). While
Korte traces the development of British short fiction from its earliest
beginnings in the sixteenth century to its most recent examples at the
end of the twentieth century, the joint publication by Liggins, Maunder,
and Robbins focuses on the history of the British short story from the
Victorian Age to the present.
But within this newly evolving field of research, too, the black British
short story has received little attention. Neither does the term ‘black
British short story’ exist as a recognised category of literary analysis,
nor has the sheer number and variety of black British short stories been
acknowledged. There is no book-length study of the black British short
story and previous criticism on the genre is confined to brief mention-
ings, single case studies, or individual book chapters. Korte is the first
to observe that the “[g]rowing awareness of the diversification of British
society and culture has made ‘ethnicity’ [a] prominent theme in recent
British literature,” giving rise to, among others, “[t]he Black and Asian
British short story” (2003, 166–167). In her recent contribution to The
Cambridge Companion to the English Short Story (2016), she observantly
elaborates that the short story has been “an important genre for explor-
ing and questioning the legacy of the empire in Britain itself” (52). By
discussing a wide range of examples, including stories by Muriel Spark,
Samuel Selvon, E.A. Markham, Jackie Kay, Courttia Newland, Salman
Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, and Manzu Islam, Korte shows that the British
short story has captured the multifaceted experiences of postcolonial
migrant life in diverse ways (see 52). Yet, she does not take up her ear-
lier notion of a genuinely ‘Black and Asian British short story’. What is
more, through her primary concern with the short story’s negotiation
of race, ethnicity and migration, Korte insufficiently acknowledges the
extent to which contemporary black British short fiction addresses a
great variety of postethnic themes that appeal to all Britons and even all
human beings.
Similarly, Parker’s essay on “Hybrid Voices and Visions” (2008) offers
insightful case studies of short fiction by E.A. Markham, Ben Okri,
Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Patricia Duncker, as well as Jackie Kay,
18 B. JANSEN

but is strikingly oblivious to the existence of a larger tradition of black

British short story writing. Published in 2009, March-Russell’s gen-
re-theoretical monograph on The Short Story implicitly comments on
the black British short story in the chapter on postcolonial short fiction.
March-Russell briefly mentions Samuel Selvon’s Ways of Sunlight (254),
detects in Pauline Melville’s stories a yearning “for a new social arrange-
ment” (255), and investigates the portrayal of “identity, migration, his-
tory and myth” (256) in Rushdie’s (1994) story collection East, West.
Two years later, Liggins, Maunder, and Robbins provide the first
lengthy discussion of black British short fiction in their subsection
on “Black British writers and multiculturalism: Jackie Kay and Hanif
Kureishi” (2011, 247–254). But they do not acknowledge the ways in
which Kay and Kureishi are part of a larger tradition of black British
short story writing. More importantly, this book will show that it is lim-
iting and even wrong to consider Kay’s and Kureishi’s short stories pri-
marily as “narratives of multicultural life” (246). Inspired by the authors’
biographies, Liggins, Maunder, and Robbins read Kay’s and Kureishi’s
short stories as contemporary responses to “the race question” (247) and
overlook that the large majority of their stories are not primarily con-
cerned with race or ethnicity. Kay’s and Kureishi’s narratives attack the
logic of multiculturalism and explore alternative, postethnic modes of
coexistence that appeal to all people living in Britain regardless of skin
colour, religion, or nationality.
Finally, Malcolm indirectly draws attention to the existence of black
British short story writing in his British and Irish Short Story Handbook
(2012). Malcolm includes Hanif Kureishi in his list of “Key Authors”
in the history of the British and Irish short story (120–121) and he
discusses Kureishi’s short story “We’re Not Jews” as a “Key Work”
(322–323). Malcolm, too, wrongly reads Kureishi’s stories above all as
explorations of “the complexities of being Asian-British in the late twen-
tieth century” (120). However, he acknowledges the postethnic dimen-
sion of Kureishi’s short fiction when he concludes: “But, even if Asian
themes are prominent in [Kureishi’s] writing, he also speaks directly
to the experiences of the young (and not so young) and displaced and
uncertain in Britain’s metropolis” (121).
The scholarly neglect of black British short fiction seems surprising,
given that there has been an increasing acknowledgement of the genre
by prize judges, publishing houses, and journalists in recent years. In
the context of widespread attempts at the beginning of the twenty-first
 1 INTRODUCTION 19

century to “Save Our Short Story” and promote the form in Britain
(see Maunder 2007, vi; Cox 2011, xvii), short stories by Jackie Kay,
Hanif Kureishi, and Zadie Smith were shortlisted for the newly launched,
prestigious National Short Story Award.8 The publication of Jackie Kay’s
first collection of short stories Why Don’t You Stop Talking (2002) was
greeted enthusiastically by the Irish Times, who proclaimed: “if stories
like these can still be written, the much-maligned short story form must
still be alive, not to say kicking” (quoted in Kay 2002, dust jacket).
And her second collection Wish I Was Here (2006) even earned her
the British Book Awards Decibel Writer of the Year Award. Moreover,
Suhayl Saadi’s story “Ninety-nine Kiss-o-grams” won the second prize in
the Macallan/Scotland on Sunday Short Story Competition in 1999 and
his only story collection The Burning Mirror (2001) was shortlisted for
the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award.
Black British short story writing has also gained growing recognition
from publishers. Both Zadie Smith and Hari Kunzru have come to the
attention of literary agents with short stories, and on account of these
stories have received huge advances for their first novels from publish-
ing houses (Walters 2009, 280; Aldama 2006, 110, 112). Smith’s
and Kunzru’s talents as short story writers were also acknowledged by
Penguin in 2005 when they were asked to contribute a mini collection of
short stories to the publisher’s seventieth anniversary Pocket series. Five
years later, Hanif Kureishi’s publishing house Faber and Faber showcased
his achievements in the short story form by editing his Collected Stories.
Accordingly, critics have recently begun to acknowledge that “[s]ome of
Kureishi’s best writing is in his short stories” (Smith 2013). In 2013,
Zadie Smith even pulled off the coup of publishing a single short story as
a hardback, The Embassy of Cambodia. This is an extraordinary achieve-
ment for a short story writer because this mode of publication celebrates
the individual short story as a unique piece of art and allows for an inten-
sified reading experience, uninterrupted by commercial advertisements
in magazines and irrespective of other stories in a collection. Hamish
Hamilton’s unconventional decision to print Smith’s story independently
and charge no less than £7,99 has powerfully highlighted Smith’s skills
as a short story writer and it has foregrounded the existence of black
British short fiction more generally. Most recently, The Penguin Book
of the British Short Story (2015, vol. 2), edited by Philip Hensher, has
acknowledged the contribution that black British writers have made to
the development of the British short story by including short stories by
20 B. JANSEN

Samuel Selvon, V.S. Naipaul, and Zadie Smith. In the introduction to his
well-devised and varied anthology, Hensher celebrates Smith as one of
“the best short story writers now at work” (2015, xxvi) and he explicitly
mentions Jackie Kay’s achievements in the form even though he does not
include a story by her (see xxxii).

5  Objectives and Text Selection

Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story offers the first
systematic and comprehensive study of black British short story writing.
It sets out to shed light on a thriving literary genre that attracts aspir-
ing as well as established writers but has received little attention from
literary scholarship. In doing so, this book wants to further the debate
about black British literature, stimulate research into new facets of black
British writing, and contribute to the emerging field of British short fic-
tion research. Apart from establishing the black British short story as a
multifarious and substantial literary genre, this study aims to show that
contemporary black British short fiction is permeated by questions of
community. Black British writers use the short story form to combat
deeply entrenched notions of community and experiment with non-
essentialist alternatives across differences of ethnicity, culture, religion,
and nationality. It is my contention that the short format invites a higher
degree of experimentation with alternative forms of communal belong-
ing than, for instance, the widely studied black British novel. Indeed,
different from black British writing in other genres, black British short
stories have early on tended to surpass their specific black British and
postcolonial context and reimagined community on a more general, even
ontological level.
This book traces the black British short story from its postwar
beginnings until today, putting special emphasis on contemporary black
British short stories published after 1980. The study’s broad historical
perspective allows for an understanding of the black British short story as
a narrative genre in its own right with a distinct tradition and salient fea-
tures. Having established Samuel Selvon’s pathfinding role in the 1950s
and Farrukh Dhondy’s contribution to the development of the genre in
the late 1970s, the book primarily examines the work of the present-day
writers Hanif Kureishi, Jackie Kay, Suhayl Saadi, Zadie Smith, and Hari
Kunzru. These authors have used the short story most creatively to
destroy the easy binaries of Self and Other, black and white, immigrant
 1 INTRODUCTION 21

and resident, which cannot explain the complexities of social formations

in the postmodern era. The book charts how these writers, each with his
or her very distinctive style and agenda, articulate novel ways of imagin-
ing community. It delineates similarities in their renegotiation of com-
munity and points to semantic and aesthetic differences, developing a
typology of the black British short story.
Through an innovative approach that combines postcolonial con-
cepts of community with deconstructive philosophies of community,
Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story seeks to con-
tribute to the conceptual development of research into black British
writing. So far, black British literature has mostly been read through the
lens of postcolonial theory, especially when scholars focus on questions
of immigration, ethnic identity, and communal belonging. My analyses
intend to show that other theoretical approaches to community yield
insightful results, too. Indeed, postcolonial theories of community are
of limited relevance for an understanding of contemporary black British
short stories because the majority of these stories surpass the realm of the
postcolonial in order to enquire into mechanisms of human coexistence.
Their ontological revision of monolithic conceptions of community calls
for the application of contemporary philosophies of community, which
similarly aim to deconstruct traditional notions of homogeneity, shared
essence, and infinity both on a concrete political-ethical and a general
ontological level. The ensuing discussions rely on Jean-Luc Nancy’s the-
ory of a singularly plural ‘inoperative community.’ Nancy is one of the
crucial thinkers of our times, whose philosophy of community seems
highly pertinent to literary analysis because it culminates in a theory of
literature.
Overall, this book is the outcome of the meticulous analysis of 172
short stories and the critical reading of many more that could not be
included in this study. That is to say, Narratives of Community in the Black
British Short Story is far from offering an exhaustive study of black British
short fiction. Rather, it aims to discuss the most representative examples
of black British short story writing, with a particular focus on contempo-
rary black British short stories after 1980. As I map the development of
the black British short story from the 1950s to the present, I necessarily
simplify its trajectory. Naturally, the short story has been used in multiple
ways at any one time in its history, and the typology I develop should sim-
ply be understood as an attempt to chart the general evolution of black
British short fiction. There are overlaps between phases and categories
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 212.3 Thureau-Dangin, Les cylindres de Goudéa, p. 57: Les héros
morts leur bouche auprès d’une fontaine il plaça.
212.4 Winckler, op. cit., p. 41.
212.5 Jeremias, op. cit., p. 15.
213.1 E.g. Peiser, Sketch of Babylonian Society, in the Smithsonian

Institute, 1898, p. 586, speaks as if it was ancestor-worship that held

the Babylonian family together.
213.2 Vide my article on “Hero-worship” in Hibbert Journal, 1909, p.
417.
214.1 V. Landau, Phönizische Inschr., p. 15.
214.2 Jeremias, Hölle u. Paradies, p. 37.
215.1 It would be idle for my purpose to distinguish between the so-
called “Achaean” and “Pelasgian” elements in the Homeric Νέκυια;
even if the latter ethnic term was of any present value for Greek
religion.
215.2 Hesiod, Ἔργ. 110-170 (the men of the golden and the silver
ages and the heroes).
216.1 Vide Zimmern in K.A.T.3, pp. 636-639; Jeremias, Hölle u.
Paradies, p. 25; cf. his Die Babyl. Assyr. Vorstellungen rom. Leben
nach dem Tode.
216.2 Vide supra, p. 160.
216.3 Zimmern, op. cit., p. 520; King, op. cit., p. 188.
217.1 King, op. cit., p. 138.
217.2 Lagrange, Études sur les religions sémitiques, p. 493.
218.1 Cf. Keil. Bibl., ii. 109; Jeremias, Hölle u. Paradies, pp. 13-14.
219.1 Jastrow, op. cit., pp. 472-473.
219.2 Ib., p. 473.
219.3 Ib., p. 472.
219.4 Zimmern in Sitzungsber. d. Kön. Sächs. Gesell. Wiss. 1907,

“Sumerisch-Babylonische Tanzlieder,” p. 220.

219.5 Vide Jeremias in his article on “Nergal” in Roscher’s Lexikon,
iii. p. 251.
219.6 It is doubtful if any argument can be based on the name
Ningzu, occasionally found as the name of the consort of Ereshkigal
(Zimmern, K.A.T.3, p. 637) and said to mean “Lord of Healing,” in
reference, probably, to the waters of life.
219.7 Only in the story of Adapa he appears as one of the warders

of the gates of heaven (Zimmern, K.A.T.3, p. 521).

220.1 The story of Aphrodite descending into Hades to seek Adonis
is much later than the period with which we are dealing. Nergal’s
descent to satisfy the wrath of Allatu and his subsequent marriage
with her (Jeremias, Hölle und Paradies, p. 22) is a story of entirely
different motive to the Rape of Kore.
 CHAPTER XIII NOTES
223.1 Cook, The Religion of Ancient Palestine, p. 17.
223.2 Researches in Sinai, p. 72, etc., 186: he would carry back the
foundation to the fourth millennium B.C.
223.3 Vide Arch. Anzeig., 1909, p. 498.
223.4 Vide Cults, iii. p. 299.
224.1 Vide Hogarth’s evidence for the date of the earliest

Artemision, Excavations at Ephesus, p. 244.

224.2 Il., i. 38.
224.3 Ib., vi. 269, 299-300.
224.4 Ib., ii. 550.
224.5 Ib., ix. 405.
224.6 Vide Stengel, Griechische Sacral-Altertümer, p. 17.
224.7 Vide Athen. Mittheil., 1911, pp. 27, 192.
225.1 Vide Jeremias in Roscher, Lexikon, ii. p. 2347, s.v. “Marduk.”
225.2 Something near to it would be found in the cult-phrase Ζεὺς
Νᾶος of Dodona, which is a form commoner in the inscriptions than
Ζεὺς Νάϊος, if, with M. Reinach (Rev. Archéol., 1905, p. 97), we
regarded this as the original title and interpreted it as “Zeus-Temple.”
But the interpretation is hazardous.
225.3 A disk on the top of a pole, vide Jastrow, Rel. Bab. Assyr.,
vol. i. p. 203.
226.1 Cook, op. cit., p. 28.
226.2 Religion of the Semites, pp. 185-195; “Mycenaean Tree and
Pillar Cult,” Hell. Journ., 1901. It is interesting to note that Baitylos, a
name derived from the Semitic description of the sacred stone as the
“House of God,” is given as the name of a divine king in the
cosmogony of Philo Byblius, Müller, Frag. Hist. Graec., iii. p. 567; cf.
the baitylos with human head found at Tegea inscribed Διὸς
Στορπάω (fifth century B.C.), “Zeus of the lightning” (Eph. Arch.,
1906, p. 64).
 227.1 Vide Evans, op. cit., and Annual of British School, 1908,
1909.
227.2 Vide my Cults, i. pp. 13-18, 102; ii. pp. 520, 670; iv. pp. 4,
149, 307; v. pp. 7, 240, 444.
227.3 For the evidence of a pillar-cult of Apollo Agyieus and
Karneios coming from the north, vide Cults, vol. iv. pp. 307-308.
227.4 The pillars known as “Kudurru,” with emblems of the various
divinities upon them, served merely as boundary-stones (vide
Jastrow, op. cit., i. p. 191; Hilprecht in Babylonian Expedition of
University of Pennsylvania, vol. iv.).
228.1 6, 269.
228.2 Cults, ii. 445.
228.3 Op. cit., vol. v. p. 8.
229.1 Arnob. Adv. Gent., 5, 19 (in the mysteries of the Cyprian
Venus), “referunt phallos propitii numinis signa donatos.”
229.2 Cook, Religion of Ancient Palestine, p. 28; cf. Corp. Inscr.
Sem., i. 11. 6, inscription found in cave, dedicated perhaps by the
hierodulai, “pudenda muliebria” carved on the wall.
229.3 Rel. of Sem., pp. 437-438.
229.4 De Dea Syria, c. 16 and c. 28.
229.5 Histoire de l’Art, iv. pl. viii, D.
230.1 Jeremias, in his articles on “Izdubar” and “Nebo” in Roscher’s
Lexikon, ii. p. 792 and iii. p. 65, concludes that a phallic emblem was
employed in the ritual of Ishtar; but he bases his view on the
translation of the word ibattu in the Gilgamesh Epic, which is
differently rendered by King, Babylonian Religion, p. 163, and
Zimmern, K.A.T.3, p. 572.
230.2 Thureau-Dangin, Les Cylindres de Goudéa, p. 69.
231.1 This may explain the double phrase, used concerning the
institution and endowment of temple-rites in an inscription of the time
of Tiglath-Pileser III., which Zimmern translates by “Opfer-
Mahlzeiten,” Keil. Bibl., iv. p. 103; cf. especially K.B., iii. p. 179 (inscr.
of ninth century); Zimmern, Beiträge zur Kenntniss der Babyl. Relig.,
ii. p. 99 (sacred loaves offered before consultation of divinity).
231.2 Vide Robertson Smith, op. cit., p. 200.
 231.3 Vide Cults, i. p. 88; v. p. 199.
232.1 Judges ix. 13; cf. Robertson Smith, op. cit., p. 203.
232.2 Lagrange, Études sur les religions sémitiques, p. 506. This

seems to agree with the statement in Diodorus (19, 94) that the
Nabataeans tabooed wine; yet Dusares, the Arabian counterpart of
Dionysos, was a Nabataean god.
232.3 Gray, Shamash Religious Texts, p. 21.
232.4 Dhorme, Choix, etc., p. 41, l. 136.
232.5 Vide Cults, iii. p. 390, R. 57h.
232.6 Ib., ii. p. 646.
234.1 Robertson Smith, op. cit., pp. 272-273.
234.2 Athenae. 376a (Cults, i. p. 141).
234.3 Cults, ii. pp. 646-647.
234.4 O. Weber, Dämonenbeschwörung, p. 29; his note on the
passage “that the unclean beast is offered as a substitute for an
unclean man” is not supported by any evidence.
234.5 Zimmern, K.A.T.3, pp. 409-410.
235.1 Robertson Smith’s theory that the gift-sacrifice was a later
degeneracy from the communion-type is unconvincing; vide specially
an article by Ada Thomsen, “Der Trug von Prometheus,” Arch. Relig.
Wissensch., 1909, p. 460.
236.1 “Sacrificial Communion in Greek Religion,” in Hibbert Journal,
1904.
236.2 E.g. Il., 1, 457-474; Od., 3, 1-41; 14, 426.
236.3 Cf. Schol. Od., 3, 441 (who defines οὐλοχύται as barley and

salt mixed with water or wine… καὶ ἔθυον αὐτὰ πρὸ τοῦ ἱερείου…
κριθὰς δὲ ἐνέβαλον τοῖς θύμασι χάριν εὐφορίας); Schol. Arist. Equ.,
1167, τοῖς θύμασιν ἐπιβαλλόμεναι [κριφαί]. Vide Fritz. Hermes, 32,
235; for another theory, vide Stoll, “Alte Taufgebraüche,” in Arch.
Relig. Wissensch., 1905, Beiheft, p. 33.
237.1 Vide Evans, “Mycenaean Tree and Pillar Cult,” Hell. Journ.,
1901, pp. 114-115.
237.2 Od., 14, 426; cf. the custom reported from Arabia of mingling
hair from the head of a worshipper with the paste from which an idol
is made.
 237.3 Aristoph. Pax., 956.
237.4 Athenae, p. 419, B.
237.5 Vide Arch. Rel. Wiss., 1909, p. 467; Thomsen there explains
it wholly from the idea of tabu.
237.6 The common meal of the thiasotaï is often represented on
later reliefs, vide Perdriyet, “Reliefs Mysiens,” Bull. Corr. Hell., 1899,
p. 592.
238.1 Vide Cults, i. pp. 56-58, 88-92.
239.1 In my article on “Sacrificial Communion in Greek Religion,”
Hibbert Journal, 1904, p. 320, I have been myself guilty of this, in
quoting the story told by Polynaenus (Strategem. 8, 43), about the
devouring of the mad bull with golden horns by the Erythraean host,
as containing an example of a true sacrament.
239.2 Vide Cults, vol. i. p. 145.
239.3 See Crusius’ article in Roscher’s Lexikon, s.v. “Harpalyke.”
240.1 Vide Cults, v. pp. 161-172.
240.2 Ib., v. p. 165.
241.1 K.A.T.3, p. 596.
241.2 Jeremias, Die Cultus-Tafel von Sippar, p. 26.
241.3 Zimmern, Beiträge zur Kennt. Bab. Rel., p. 15.
242.1 Vide Frazer, Adonis-Attis-Osiris, p. 189; cf. “Communion in
Greek Religion,” Hibbert Journ., 1904, p. 317.
242.2 Jeremias, Die Cultus-Tafel von Sippar, p. 28.
243.1 Weber, Dämonenbeschwörung, etc., p. 29.
243.2 iv. R2, pl. 26, No. 6; this is the inscription quoted by Prof.

Sayce (vide infra, p. 182, n.) as a document proving human sacrifice.

I owe the above translation to the kindness of Dr. Langdon; it differs
very slightly from Zimmern’s in K.A.T.3, p. 597.
243.3 Jeremias, op. cit., p. 29.
243.4 Renan’s thesis (C. I. Sem., i. p. 229) that the idea of sin, so
dominant in the Hebrew and Phoenician sacrifice, was entirely
lacking in the Hellenic, cannot be maintained; he quotes Porph. De
Abstin., 1, 2, 24, a passage which contains an incomplete theory of
Greek sacrifice. The sin-offering is indicated by Homer, and is
recognised frequently in Greek literature and legend; only no
technical term was invented to distinguish it from the ordinary
cheerful sacrifice.
244.1 Cults, ii. p. 441.
244.2 Vide K.A.T.3, pp. 434, 599, where Zimmern refers to the
monuments published by Ménant, Pierres gravées, i. figs. 94, 95, 97,
as possibly showing a scene of human sacrifice. But Ménant’s
interpretation of them is wrong; vide Langdon, Babyloniaca, Tome iii.
p. 236, “two Babylonian seals”; the kneeling figure is the owner of
the seal; the personage behind him is no executioner, but Ramman
or Teschub holding, not a knife, but his usual club. The inscriptions
published by Prof. Sayce (Trans. Soc. Bibl. Arch., iv. pp. 25-29) are
translated differently by Dr. Langdon, so that the first one (iv. R2, pl.
26, No. 6) refers to the sacrifice of a kid, not of an infant. The
misinterpretation of the inscription has misled Trumbull (Blood
Covenant, p. 166). The statement in 2 Kings xvii. 31 about the
Sepharvites in Samaria does not necessarily point to a genuine
Babylonian ritual, even if we are sure that the Sepharvites were
Babylonians.
245.1 Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, p. 95.
245.2 The excavations at Gezer have revealed almost certain
evidence of the early practice of human sacrifice; a number of
skeletons, one of a girl sawn in half, were found buried under the
foundation of houses (vide Cook, op. cit., pp. 38-39).
246.1 Stengel, Die griechischen Kultusaltertümer, p. 89.
246.2 K.A.T.3, p. 599.
246.3 Jastrow, op. cit., i. p. 500.
246.4 Might this be the meaning of a line in a hymn translated by
Jastrow, op. cit., p. 549, “I turn myself to thee (O Goddess Gula), I
have grasped thy cord as the cord of my god and goddess” (vide
King, Babyl. Magic, No. 6, No. 71-94); or of the phrase in the
Apocrypha (Epist. Jerem., 43), “The women also with cords about
them sit in the ways”?
246.5 Zimmern’s Beiträge, etc., p. 99.
247.1 On the famous bronze plaque of the Louvre (Jeremias, Hölle
und Paradies, p. 28, Abb. 6) we see two representatives of Ea in the
fish-skin of the god; and on a frieze of Assur-nasir-pal in the British
Museum (Hell. Journ., 1894, p. 115, fig. 10; Layard, Monuments of
Nineveh, 1, pl. 30), two men in lions’ skins; but these are not skins of
animals of sacrifice.
247.2 Vide my Evolution of Religion, pp. 118-120.
248.1 K.A.T.3, p. 49.
248.2 3, 300; 19, 265-267.
248.3 Polybius, 3, 25, ἐγὼ μόνος ἐκπέσοιμι οὕτως ὡς ὅδε λίθος
νῦν.
248.4 Op. cit., ii. p. 217.
250.1 According to Dr. Langdon (op. cit., p. xvi.), the wailing for
Tammuz was developed in the early Sumerian period of the fourth
millennium.
251.1 Langdon, op. cit., 300-341; cf. Zimmern, “Sumerisch-
Babylonische Tamuzlieder,” in Sitzungsber. König. Sächs. Gesell.
Wissen., 1907, pp. 201-252, and his discussion, “Der Babylonische
Gott Tamuz,” in Abhandl. König. Sächs. Gesell. Wissen., 1909.
251.2 Vide supra, p. 105.
251.3 Vide Langdon, op. cit., p. 501.
251.4 Antiqu., 8, 5, 3; cf. Clem. Recogn., 10, 24; Baudissin in his
Eschmun-Asklepios (Oriental. Stud. zu Nöldeke gewidmet, p. 752)
thinks that the Healer-god, Marduk Asclepios Eschmun, is himself
one who died and rose again in Assyrian and Phoenician theology.
For Asklepios of Berytos we have the almost useless story of
Damascius in Phot. Bibl., 573 H.; the uncritical legend in Ktesias (c.
21) and Ael. Var. Hist., 13, 3, about the grave of Belitana at Babylon
(to which Strabo also alludes, p. 740), does not justify the view that
the death of Marduk was ever a Babylonian dogma.
252.1 Perrot-Chipiez, Histoire de l’Art, iv. pl. viii.
253.1 Rev. de Philol., 1893, p. 195.
253.2 Vide Frazer, op. cit., pp. 98-99.
253.3 K. O. Müller, Kleine Schriften, vol. ii. pp. 102-103.
253.4 Journ. Roy. Asiat. Soc., 1909, pp. 966, 971; the information
about the true meaning of the ideogram I owe to Dr. Langdon.
254.1 Vide supra, p. 91; cf. Cults, ii. pp. 644-649; iii. pp. 300-305.
 254.2 The Babylonian myths of Etana and Adapa, and their ascent
to heaven, may have given the cue to the Phrygian stories of
Ganymede and Tantalos.
256.1 Dr. Frazer, in Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings (G. B., vol.
ii. p. 45), quotes from N. Tsackni (La Russie Sectaire, p. 74) an
example of a fanatic Christian sect in modern Russia practising
castration. I have not been able to find this treatise.
257.1 Vide Cults, iii. pp. 300-301. Dr. Frazer’s theory is that the act
of castration was performed in order to maintain the fruitfulness of
the earth (op. cit., pp. 224-237). But this is against the countless
examples which he himself has adduced of the character and
function of the priest or priest-king as one whose virile strength
maintains the strength of the earth; the sexual act performed in the
field by the owner increases the fruitfulness of the field (Frazer, GB2,
ii. p. 205). Why should the priest make himself impotent so as to
improve the crops? The only grounds of his belief appear to be that
the priest’s testicles were committed to the earth or to an
underground shrine of Kybele (Arnob. Adv. Gent., v. 14, and Schol.
Nikand. Alexipharm., 7; vide Cults, 3; Kybele Ref. 54a); but such
consecration of them to Kybele would be natural on any hypothesis,
and Arnobius’ words do not prove that they were buried in the bare
earth.
259.1 Vide Cults, i. pp. 36-38.
259.2 Vide Evolution of Religion, p. 62.
260.1 Porph. Vit. Pyth., 17; cf. Callim. H. ad. Jov., 8; Diod. Sic., 3,
61; vide Cults, i. pp. 36-37.
260.2 Vide A. Evans in Hell. Journ., xvii. 350.
261.1 Vide Cults, vol. ii. p. 651; cf. Clem. Recogn., 10, 24,

“sepulcrum Cypriae Veneris apud Cyprum.”

261.2 Ib., pp. 651-652.
261.3 Vide Cults, vol. ii. pp. 447, n. c., 478, 638, n. a.
261.4 Aristot. Rhet., 2, 23.
262.1 Athenae, p. 620 A (ζητεῖν αὐτὸν τοὺς ἀπὸ τῆς χώρας μετά

τινος μεμελῳδημένου θρήνου καὶ ἀνακλήσεως); Pollux., 4, 54.

262.2 Frazer, GB2, vol. ii. p. 106.
 263.1 Vide Thureau-Dangin, Vorderasiatische Bibliothek, i. p. 77.
263.2 Weber, Arabien vor dem Islam, p. 19.
264.1 Vide Evans in Hell. Journ., 1901, p. 176.
264.2 Cults, i. pp. 184-191.
264.3 Ib., iii. pp. 123-124.
264.4 Ib., iii. p. 176; cf. vol. iv. p. 34 n. b.
264.5 Ib., i. pp. 189-190.
265.1 1, 181.
265.2 Vide, for instance, Dr. Langdon in the Expositor, 1909, p. 143.
265.3 Winckler, Die Gesetze Hammurabi, p. 182.
266.1 Vide Dieterich, Mithras-Liturgie, pp. 126-127; Reizenstein,

Die hellenistischen Mysterien-religionen.

266.2 Vide Herzog’s Real-Encyclop., s.v. “Montanismus.”
266.3 Jourdanet et Siméon transl. of Sahagun, pp. 147-148.
266.4 Golther, Handbuch der Germanischen Mythologie, p. 229; cf.
Mannhardt, Baumkultus, p. 589.
267.1 Pausan., 2, 33, 3; 9, 27, 6; cf. my article in Archiv. für
Religionswiss., 1904, p. 74; E. Fehrle, Die Kultische Keuschheit im
Alterthum, p. 223, gives other examples which appear to me more
doubtful.
267.2 Paus., 3, 16, 1.
267.3 Cults, v. pp. 217-219.
268.1 Vide Cults, v. p. 109.
268.2 Winckler, op. cit., p. 110; Johns, op. cit., p. 54.
269.1 Code, § 182.
269.2 Jastrow, op. cit., ii. 157.
269.3 Vide Winckler’s interpretation of §§ 178, 180, 181; cf. also

Zimmern in K.A.T.3, 423.

269.4 1, 199.
270.1 E.g. Zimmern in K.A.T.3, p. 423.
270.2 Verse 43.
271.1 The first to insist emphatically on the necessity of their
distinction was Mr. Hartland, in Anthropological Essays presented to
E. B. Tylor, pp. 190-191; but he has there, I think, wrongly classified
—through a misunderstanding of a phrase in Aelian—the Lydian
custom that Herodotus (1, 93) and Aelian (Var. Hist., iv. 1) refer to;
both these writers mention the custom of the women of Lydia
practising prostitution before marriage. Aelian does not mention the
motive that Herodotus assigns, the collection of a dowry; neither
associates it with religion. Aelian merely adds that when once
married the Lydian women were virtuous; this need have nothing to
do with the Mylitta-rite.
272.1 E.g. Hosea iv. 13; Deut. xxiii. 18; 1 Kings xiv. 24.
272.2 Weber, Arabien vor dem Islam, p. 18.
272.3 C. I. Sem., 1, 263.
272.4 Strab., 272.
272.5 Strab., 559.
272.6 Pind. Frag., 87; Strab., 378; (Cults, ii. p. 746, R. 99g).
273.1 Cities and Bishoprics, i. 94. In his comment he rightly points

out that the woman is Lydian, as her name is not genuine Roman;
but he is wrong in speaking of her service as performed to a god
(Frazer, Adonis, etc., p. 34, follows him). This would be a unique
fact, for the service in Asia Minor is always to a goddess; but the
inscription neither mentions nor implies a god. The bride of Zeus at
Egyptian Thebes was also a temple-harlot, if we could believe
Strabo, p. 816; but on this point he contradicts Herodotus, 1, 182.
273.2 Et. Mag., s.v. Ἱκόνιον.
274.1 De Dea Syr., 6; cf. Aug. De Civ. Dei, 4, 10: “cui (Veneri) etiam
Phoenices donum dabant de prostitutione filiarum, antequam eas
jungerent viris”: religious prostitution before marriage prevailed
among the Carthaginians in the worship of Astarte (Valer. Max., 2,
ch. 1, sub. fin.: these vague statements may refer either to
defloration of virgins or prolonged service in the temple).
274.2 See Frazer, op. cit., p. 33, n. 1, quoting Sozomen. Hist.
Eccles., 5, 10, 7; Sokrates, Hist. Eccles., 1, 18, 7-9; Euseb. Vita
Constantin., 3, 58. Eusebius only vaguely alludes to it. Sokrates
merely says that the wives were in common, and that the people had
the habit of giving over the virgins to strangers to violate.
Sozomenos is the only voucher for the religious aspect of the
practice; from Sokrates we gather that the rule about strangers was
observed in the rite.
274.3 18, 5.
274.4 This is confirmed by the legend given by Apollodoros (Bibl., 3,
14, 3) that the daughters of Kinyras, owing to the wrath of Aphrodite,
had sexual intercourse with strangers.
275.1 Justin, 21, 3; Athenaeus, 516 A, speaks vaguely, as if the
women of the Lokri Epizephyrii were promiscuous prostitutes.
275.2 Pp. 532-533.
275.3 The lovers, Melanippos and Komaitho, sin in the temple of
Artemis Triklaria of the Ionians in Achaia; the whole community is
visited with the divine wrath, and the sinners are offered up as a
piacular sacrifice (Paus., 7, 19, 3); according to Euphorion,
Laokoon’s fate was due to a similar trespass committed with his wife
before the statue of Apollo (Serv. Aen., 2, 201). It may be that such
legends faintly reflect a very early ἱερὸς γάμος once performed in
temples by the priest and priestess: if so, they also express the
repugnance of the later Hellene to the idea of it; and in any case this
is not the institution that is being discussed.
276.1 Antike Wald u. Feld Kulte, p. 285, etc.
277.1 Why should not the priestess rather play the part of the
goddess, and why, if we trust Plutarch (Vit. Artaxerx., 27), was the
priestess of Anaitis at Ekbatana, to whose temple harlots were
attached, obliged to observe chastity after election?
277.2 Vol. i. pp. 94-96.
277.3 Op. cit., p. 35, etc.
277.4 Op. cit., p. 44.
278.1 I pointed out this objection in an article in the Archiv. f. Relig.
Wissensch., 1904, p. 81; Mr. S. Hartland has also, independently,
developed it (op. cit., p. 191).
278.2 Vol. ii. p. 446.
278.3 Origin of Civilisation, pp. 535-537.
279.1 Vide Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, p. 76.
279.2 Mr. Hartland objects (loc. cit., p. 200) to this explanation on
the ground that the stranger would dislike the danger as much as
any one else; but the rite may have arisen among a Semitic tribe
who were peculiarly sensitive to that feeling of peril, while they found
that the usual stranger was sceptical and more venturesome: when
once the rule was established, it could become a stereotyped
convention. His own suggestion (p. 201) that a stranger was alone
privileged, lest the solemn act should become a mere love-affair with
a native lover, does not seem to me so reasonable; to prevent that,
the act might as well have been performed by a priest. Dr. Frazer in
his new edition of Adonis, etc. (pp. 50-54), criticises my explanation,
which I first put forth—but with insufficient clearness—in the Archiv.
für Religionswissenschaft (1904, p. 88), mainly on the ground that it
does not naturally apply to general temple-prostitution nor to the
prostitution of married women. But it was never meant to apply to
these, but only to the defloration of virgins before marriage. Dr.
Frazer also argues that the account of Herodotus does not show that
the Babylonian rite was limited to virgins. Explicitly it does not, but
implicitly it does; for Herodotus declares that it was an isolated act,
and therefore to be distinguished from temple-prostitution of
indefinite duration; and he adds that the same rite was performed in
Cyprus, which, as the other record clearly attests, was the
defloration of virgins by strangers. Sozomenos and Sokrates attest
the same of the Baalbec rite, and Eusebius’s vague words are not
sufficient to contradict them. One rite might easily pass into the
other; but our theories as to the original meaning of different rites
should observe the difference.
280.1 But vide Gennep, Les Rites de passage, p. 100.
280.2 Cf. Arnob. Adv. Gent., 5, 19, with Firmic. Matern. De Error.,
10, and Clemens, Protrept., c. 2, p. 12, Pott.
281.1 1, 199.
281.2 The lady who there boasts of her prostitute-ancestresses
describes them also as “of unwashed feet”; and this is a point of
asceticism and holiness.
282.1 Op. cit., p. 199.
282.2 K.A.T.3, p. 423.
283.1 Vide supra, p. 163. The writer of the late apocryphal
document, “The Epistle of Jeremy,” makes it a reproach to the
Babylonian cult that “women set meat before the gods” (v. 30), and
“the menstruous woman and the woman in child-bed touch their
sacrifices” (v. 29), meaning, perhaps, that there was nothing to
prevent the Babylonian priestess being in that condition. But we
cannot trust him for exact knowledge of these matters. Being a Jew,
he objects to the ministration of women. The Babylonian and Hellene
were wiser, and admitted them to the higher functions of religion.
283.2 Vide Cults, iv. p. 301.
283.3 Vide Inscription of Sippar in British Museum, concerning the
re-establishment of cult of Shamash by King Nabupaladdin, 884-860
B.C. (Jeremias, Die Cultus-Tafel von Sippar).
284.1 Sumerian and Babylonian Psalms, p. 75.
284.2 Vide Langdon in Transactions of Congress for the History of
Religions (1908), vol. i. p. 250.
284.3 Vide Zeitung für Assyriologie, 1910, p. 157.
284.4 Formula for driving out the demon of sickness, “Bread at his

head place, rain-water at his feet place” (Langdon, ib. p. 252).

284.5 Delitsch, Wörterbuch, i. 79-80.
284.6 Zeit. für Assyr., 1910, p. 157.
284.7 Vide Hippocrates (Littré), vi. 362; Stengel, Griechischer
Kultusaltertümer (Iwan Müller’s Handbuch, p. 110).
285.1 Referred to in the comedy of Eupolis called the “Baptai.”
285.2 Jastrow, op. cit., p. 500.
285.3 Op. cit., p. 297, 487; the priest-exorciser, the Ashipu, uses a
brazier in the expulsion of demons.
285.4 Vide Golther, Handbuch der Germanischen Mythologie, p.
580; cf. my Cults, v. p. 196.
285.5 Cults, vol. v. pp. 383-384; cf. iv. p. 301.
286.1 Cults, v. p. 356; cf. p. 363 (the purifying animal carried round
the hearth).
286.2 Eur. Herc. Fur., 928.
286.3 Dio Chrys. Or., 48 (Dind., vol. ii. p. 144), περικαθήραντες τὴν
πόλιν μὴ σκίλλῃ μηδὲ δαδί, πολὺ δὲ καθαρωτέρῳ χρήματι τῷ λόγῳ
(cf. Lucian, Menipp., c. 7, use of squills and torches in “katharsis,” (?)
Babylonian or Hellenic); Serv. ad Aen., 6, 741, “in sacris omnibus
tres sunt istae purgationes, nam aut taeda purgant aut sulphure aut
aqua abluunt aut aere ventilant.”
286.4 “To take fire and swear by God” is a formula that occurs in the
third tablet of Surpu; vide Zimmern, Beiträge zur Kenntniss Babyl.
Relig., p. 13; cf. Soph. Antig., 264.
286.5 Salt used as a means of exorcism in Babylonia as early as
the third millennium (vide Langdon, Transactions of Congress Hist.
Relig., 1908, vol. i. p. 251); the fell “of the great ox” used to purify the
palace of the king (vide Zimmern, Beiträge, p. 123; compare the Διὸς
κῴδιον in Greek ritual).
287.1 Vide Thureau-Dangin, Cylindres de Goudéa, pp. 29, 93.
287.2 Vide Evolution of Religion, pp. 113, 114, 117; Cults, v. p. 322
(Schol. Demosth., 22, p. 68).
287.3 5, 13, 6.
287.4 Vide Cults, iii. pp. 303-304; Evolution of Religion, p. 121.
288.1 Vide supra, p. 146.
288.2 Vide Cults, iii. p. 167.
288.3 Published in Zimmern’s Beiträge, p. 123; cf. Weber,
Dämonenbeschwörung, pp. 17-19.
289.1 Il., xvi. 228.
289.2 Od., ii. 261.
289.3 Il., i. 313.
290.1 Od., xxii. 481: In the passage referred to above, Achilles uses
sulphur to purify the cups.
290.2 Od., xiii. 256-281: This is rightly pointed out by Stengel in his
Griechische Kultusaltertümer, p. 107.
290.3 Evolution of Religion, pp. 139-152; Cults, iv. pp. 295-306.
291.1 Vide Cults, iv. pp. 144-147, 300: To suppose that Hellas learnt
its cathartic rites from Lydia, because Herodotus (i. 35) tells us that
in his time the Lydians had the Hellenic system of purification from
homicide, is less natural. Lydia may well have learnt it from Delphi in
the time of Alyattes or Croesus. Or it may have survived in Lydia as
a tradition of the early “Minoan” period; and, similarly, it may have
survived in Crete.
291.2 Vide supra, pp. 176-178.
 292.1 Vide Cults, iv. pp. 268-284.
292.2 For similar practices, vide Cults, pp. 415-417.
292.3 Clem. Alex. Strom., p. 755, Pott.
293.1 Paus., 9, 33, 4.
293.2 For the facts vide Zimmern, K.A.T.3, p. 592.
294.1 Works and Days, l. 824.
294.2 Ib., l. 804.
294.3 Expositor, 1909, p. 156.
294.4 Vide Photius and Hesych., s.v. Μιαραὶ ἡμέραι.
295.1 Hell., 1, 4, 12.
295.2 Vide Cults, v. pp. 215-216.
295.3 Cults, iv. p. 259.
295.4 Vide supra, pp. 176-177.
296.1 Sumerian and Babylonian Psalms, p. 196.
296.2 King, Babylonian Religion, p. 196.
296.3 Vide Fossey, La Magie Assyrienne, p. 96.
297.1 Knudtzon, Assyrische Gebete an den Sonnengott, p. 78
(texts belonging to period of Asarhaddon, circ. 681).
297.2 Zimmern, Beiträge, etc., p. 161.
298.1 Zimmern, Beiträge, etc., p. 163.
298.2 Fossey, op. cit., p. 399.
298.3 iv. R. 56, 12; Fossey, op. cit., p. 401.
298.4 Expositor, 1909, p. 150, giving text from iv. R. 40.
299.1 Fossey, op. cit., p. 209.
299.2 Zimmern, Beiträge, p. 173.
299.3 Supra, p. 176.
299.4 Zimmern, op. cit., p. 169.
300.1 Zimmern, Beiträge, pp. 30-31; he mentions also the similar
practice of tying up a sheepskin or a fillet of wool and throwing it into
the fire.
300.2 Zimmern, op. cit., p. 33: note magic use of knots in general,

vide Frazer, G.B.2, vol. i. pp. 392-403; Archiv. für Religionsw., 1908,
pp. 128, 383, 405. The superstition may have prevailed in Minoan
Crete (see A. Evans, Annual British School, 1902-1903, pp. 7-9) and
was in vogue in ancient Greece.
300.3 W. Warde Fowler, The Religious Experiences of the Roman
People, Gifford Lectures, p. 49.
301.1 Vide supra, pp. 248-249; Cults, iv. p. 191.
301.2 For the main facts relating to the Babylonian system and the

“baru”-priests, vide Zimmern, Beiträge, etc., pp. 82-92; for the

Hellenic, vide Cults, iv. 190-192, 224-231; also vol. iii. 9-12.
301.3 The documentary evidence, from a very early period, is given
by Zimmern, Beiträge, etc., pp. 85-97.
301.4 L. 322: Clytemnestra speaks of pouring oil and vinegar into
the same vessel and reproaching them for their unsociable
behaviour.
302.1 We have also one example of an oracle of Ishtar (in plain
prose), Keil. Bibl., ii. p. 179.
303.1 Zimmern, op. cit., p. 89.
303.2 Cults, iii. p. 297.
303.3 Lucian, De Dea Syr., 43.
303.4 Cults, iii. p. 297.
303.5 Vide Cults, iv. pp. 191-192; iii. p. 11.
 TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES.
Page numbers are given in {curly} brackets.
Plain text version only: endnote markers are given in [square]
brackets.
Minor spelling inconsistencies (e.g. coexist/co-exist, temple-
ritual/temple ritual, etc.) have been preserved.
Add title, subtitle, and author’s name to cover image.
Alterations to the text:
Convert footnotes to endnotes, relabel note markers (append the
original note number to the page number), and add a corresponding
entry to the TOC.
[Title page]
Add commas to author’s bibliography.
[Chapter I]
Change “from the tyranny of a morbid ascetism” to asceticism.
[Chapter III]
“In his Historie des anciennes Religions, Tiele classifies” to
Histoire.
“and their aboriginal god was Possidon” to Poseidon.
[Chapter IV]
“and expecially the powers of the lower world” to especially.
“Even Allat, the goddess of Hell, she who” to Allatu.
“the great Assyrian god Ahshur is quaintly expressed” to Asshur.
“the idea that Istar is the compeer in power” to Ishtar.
“between the Hittites and the Assyrian Babylonian kingdom” to
Assyrian-Babylonian.
“no clear trace of theriomophism either in the” to theriomorphism.
“how far the Minaon religion was purely anthropomorphic” to
Minoan.
[Chapter V]
 “I formerly developed in the second volume of my cults” capitalize
and italicize cults.
[Chapter VI]
“Still less is Allalu, the monstrous and grim Queen” to Allatu.
[Chapter VII]
(Alalkomenai, “the places of Athena Alalkomene; Nemea, “the…)
add right double quotation mark after Alalkomene.
[Chapter VII]
“about whom he is particulurly thoughtful” to particularly.
[Chapter IX]
“and regards this Hititte goddess as the ancestress” to Hittite.
[Chapter XIII]
“modern savagery and the history of ascetism” to asceticism.
(and bewail her”: “If you regard her as a deity, do) delete right
double quotation mark.
[Index]
“Hell, Babylonian conception of, 205-206” add period at end of
line.
[Endnotes]
(Page 17, note 1) “Archiv fur Religionswissenschaft, 1904.” to für.
(Page 42, note 1) “that the idiogram of Enlil, the god of” to
ideogram.
(Page 84, note 3) “last of the Babylonian kings, Nabuna ’id, who
prays” to Nabuna’id.
(Page 124, note 1) “Die Phoenizischen Imschriften,” to
Phönizischen Inschriften.
(Page 148, note 1) “Weber, Dämonenbeschworung bei den
Babyloniern…” to Dämonenbeschwörung.
(Page 183, note 3) “pp. 502 503, n. 2” add comma after 502.
(Page 232, note 2) “Lagranges, Études sur les religions
sémitiques” to Lagrange.
(Page 246, note 1) “Stengel, Die griechischen Kultusalterthümer,
p. 89” to Kultusaltertümer.
(Page 286, note 5) “vide Zimmern, Beitrage, p. 123;” to Beiträge.

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