This study has endeavoured to explore through readings of ten recent novels by black British and British Asian writers how antiracism has determined the form and content of both political debate and individual minority identities in Britain. Antiracism refers to a broad range of discrete activities, behaviours, and attitudes which contest discriminatory practices based on racial or religious difference. Many of these facets have long histories and exist in their present forms only because of the many decades of struggle that have made them possible. The dominant mode of antiracism in Britain continues to be multiculturalism, even if it has been increasingly contested in recent years. Multiculturalism itself is a problematic term, with multiple and often conflicting meanings, but it perhaps remains ‘the only available ideology that has taken diversity seriously’. It is valid to question whether this respect for diversity can on its own challenge the many material bases and forms of racial discrimination, but few antiracists accept that its ideals could profitably be abandoned altogether.

Nonetheless, each of the writers examined here has a very different relationship to antiracism, and to its current mode of multiculturalism. In charting three particular flashpoints through which to explore antiracist identity (the diasporic longing for an African homeland, the otherness of Muslim Britons, and the reification of ethnicity into fixed communal structures), I certainly do not wish to suggest that these are the only crucibles in which antiracism is tested, nor that the writers themselves can easily be homogenized, or seen to have the same relation to the issues. Antiracism is always in conflict with itself at the level of individual debates; it offers little in terms of a coherent philosophy, but may perhaps in its internal tensions be able always to develop new articulations that both build on its own history and orientate around present circumstances.

While these novels were all published within a period of around eleven years (from 1995 to 2006), their writers cannot necessarily be seen as belonging to the same generation as one another, especially given the rapid changes that often take place in Britain's racial landscape.