They came, they saw, they felt conquered. Turning to the later works of Samuel Selvon and George Lamming, and the writing of Andrew Salkey, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, and Linton Kwesi Johnson, this lecture will reflect on the aesthetics of Caribbean emigrant authors.

Considering how the form of their works reflected a changing Britain in the 1960s-80s, it will explore how their motifs, and themes of fragmentation and rupture, signal the emergence of a new Black British consciousness.

Dr Malachi McIntosh

Malachi McIntosh is an Associate Professor of World Literatures in English at the University of Oxford and the Barbara Pym Tutorial Fellow in English at St. Hilda’s College. He is the author of Emigration and Caribbean Literature (2015) and the editor of Beyond Calypso: Re-Reading Samuel Selvon (2016). He is a 2023 British Library Eccles Fellow and the recipient of a Royal Society of Literature Giles St Aubyn Award (2022).

From 2019-2022, Malachi was the Editor and Publishing Director of Wasafiri, the magazine of international contemporary writing. Prior to that, he co-led the Runnymede Trust’s multiple-award-winning Our Migration Story history education project and taught at the universities of Cambridge and Warwick. His first collection of short stories, Parables, Fables, Nightmares will be published by the Emma Press in September 2023. He is currently working on a book on the Caribbean Artists Movement.