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An Introduction to African and Afro-Diasporic Peoples and Influences in British Literature and Culture before the Industrial Revolution corrects, expands, and celebrates the presence of the African Diaspora in the study of British Literature, undoing some of the anti-Black history of British studies.

The easy narrative of British cultural history with which many American students are presented leaps from Beowulf to Chaucer to Shakespeare to Empire. The slave trade led to a volume of racial constructions and revisionist histories that has certainly bled over into the current curriculum of survey-level British literature. The erasure of the history of Black people in the British Isles, like the destruction of disembarkation cards of the Windrush generation, works to perpetuate a silencing and rejection of Black Britons as Britons. As Ian Grosvenor and Lisa Amada Palmer have separately underscored, the work of anti-racism requires one to be “vigilant to the politics of erasure” (Palmer 509). But it is virtually impossible “to build an alternative narrative of the nation that includes […] the history of black political agency” without learning, first, of the presence of Blacks in Britain since before it was Britain (Grosvenor 167). Our goal in this volume is to provide representations that build an understanding of race outside of the trade-in enslaved African peoples and beyond its legacy of such a compendium of discriminations. This will not only help students understand the period but also show them how concepts of race have been historically constructed.

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