Identity! Sometimes it makes my head hurt-sometimes my heart. So what am I? Where do I fit into Britain, 2000 and beyond? -Andrea Levy, "This is My England" The legacy of the British Empire has been highly visible since the last decade of the twentieth century. The people from former British colonies, Blacks and Asians from the West Indies, West and East Africa, South Asia, Hong Kong and elsewhere, brought "global civilization" to the "ever-insular" British (Mackenzie 34), along with

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... alism and a new concept of Britishness. Multiculturalism for Bhabha is a "portmanteau" term for anything from minority discourse to postcolonial critique, from gay and lesbian studies to Chicano fiction, and it has become the most charged sign for scattered social contingencies that characterize the contemporary "Kulturkritik" ("Culture's In-Between" 55). From the British point of view, Kathleen Paul argues that while disagreement continues about the future of Britishness, a common point is the assumption that Britishness was real in the past; that at least until the advent of devolution, there was a singular and universal British national identity which covered all inhabitants, not only of the United Kingdom, but of the whole British Empire (180). However, in successive legislative acts UK policymakers felt able to reveal gradually their "narrow understanding" of what constituted "true" Britishness and in so doing conveyed an implicit recognition of the end of empire (197). Britain is still struggling to come to terms with its imperial past and is trying to come to terms with the challenges presented by a post-imperial multi-racial society. Within this highly complex social structure, the novel has proved to be a fruitful site for investigating hybridized cultural forms of Britishness. According to Dominic Head, the migrant identities that are fictionalized in post-war writing are often embattled and vulnerable, and the evocation of vulnerability has frequently to do with the "inhospitable" nature of British and especially English society, which is often portrayed as "unsympathetic" to the goals of an "interactive multiculturalism" (156).