This book is about a generation. My subjects are artists, a small and scattered collective, but they viewed themselves, and were viewed, as representatives of that generation. These men and women were unique; they came of age as British subjects in the Caribbean colonies, but as adults were domestic citizens of Britain. In both their careers and their creative work, they built bridges, between the so-called “metropole” and colony, certainly, but they also connect two eras that historians like to imagine as discrete: an era of empire, with its associations of British world power and enforced racial order, and a post-imperial era of decline, insularity, and identity crisis symbolized by the political emergence of a “Black Britain” at odds with mainstream (white) society.

That story has a neglected but vital prehistory: in the first two decades after the Second World War's end, an earlier coterie of artists fused a catholic array of concerns in their work, and found an echo in the British cultural establishment. In doing so, they were less symbols of a racial divide or national angst than a driving force behind a postwar cultural revolution.

In 1986, Carolyn Steedman drew a “landscape” for her self-sufficient— and Tory—working-class mother, who was invisible in social histories of postwar Britain and the working class and thus implicitly viewed as an anachronism. In a similar spirit, this story draws a landscape for many of those first-generation Caribbean migrants who optimistically carved out a space of belonging in British culture in the years before the full effects of anti-immigration legislation made themselves felt.