The Black Jacobeans: Jackie Kay’s Trumpet

Abstract

Chapter 3 reads Jackie Kay’s influential novel Trumpet (1998) in the light of its historical moment: the aftermath of the 1997 referendum on a Scottish parliament and the post-Thatcher context of British neoliberal governance. Trumpet provides clear evidence of the way that Black writing is recuperated into a narrative of Britishness at a key moment for the Union, which the chapter illustrates via critical readings of Kay’s work by C. L. Innes, Alan Rice, and Peter Clandfield. Against the prevailing tendency to read Trumpet as an endorsement of a fluid and post-racial Britishness, the chapter argues for its Scottish national and Black political character, drawing out its relationship with British constitutional history and Black radicalism.