Sam Selvon's Henry ‘Sir Galahad’ Oliver reacts to an experience of racial abuse by turning on the colour black, divorcing himself from the pigmentation that allows him to be marked for discrimination. The pathos in this well-known scene lies with the readers’ understanding that the young migrant from Trinidad can never place himself outside of the ‘epidermal schema’ in the way he would like. As much as the divisions of race may spring from the practice of discrimination, they become an unavoidable aspect of being for those, like Galahad, who must live within them. This study looks to a later generation than that chronicled by Selvon, taking instead as its focus ten novels written since the mid-1990s, but the force of race as a motor of discrimination, and as an inescapable component of experience, for many Britons remains potent.

In choosing to structure a study partially around the concept of race, an issue of academic style, which is in fact a fraught conceptual and political debate, must be addressed. Many of the difficulties in writing about race are indicated by the common academic practice of placing the very word in ‘a pair of self-problematizing quotation marks’ each time it is employed. In an important 1986 collection of essays on the representation of racial difference, Henry Louis Gates Jr explains why he and his colleagues adopted this convention: ‘We decided to underscore the fact that “race” is a metaphor for something else and not an essence or thing in itself, apart from its creation by an act of language’.