V.S Naipaul and George Lamming at the BBC: Reconsidering the Windrush Generation’s Political Art

Abstract

This article reconsiders V. S. Naipaul’s cultural politics by attending to his BBC work in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Because of Naipaul’s skepticism of Caribbean autonomy in his later life, critics have overlooked his anticolonial and antiracist critique in the midcentury. This elision has led to a simplification of the Windrush generation’s cultural politics. Through extensive archival work, including the examination of a heretofore unexplored Third Programme discussion, this article sheds new light on the multifarious ways that Windrush writers, particularly Naipaul and George Lamming, worked out their mutual desire for aesthetic and cultural autonomy for Caribbean writers.