The Emergence of a Black British Community: Farrukh Dhondy

Abstract

This chapter illustrates that Farrukh Dhondy’s first two story collections East End at Your Feet (1976) and Come to Mecca and Other Stories (1978) mark a significant shift in black British short story writing as they focus on second-generation Asian and West Indian characters who have grown up in London. Jansen explores how Dhondy’s debut collection negotiates hybrid Bengali British and Indian British subject positions that challenge a white, anglocentric conception of Britishness and effectively deconstruct an essentialist understanding of community. By reading Dhondy’s second collection as a portrayal of the emergence of ‘black British’ as a unifying political category that unites characters of Bengali and West Indian origins in their resistance against discrimination and institutional racism, Jansen argues that Come to Mecca re-establishes the link between bloodline and communal belonging that East End at Your Feet had deconstructed. Come to Mecca once again stresses the fundamental hereditary difference between white and black Britons.