‘You Got a White Voice’: Blackness in Devolutionary Scotland

Chapter 2 tracks the emergence of Black writers and a visible Black politics across Scottish literature in the ‘devolutionary moment’ following the referendum of 1979. The chapter proceeds chronologically, beginning with Wilson Harris’s Black Marsden (1972) as a model of Black Scottish writing, before working through the intellectual and literary context of Blackness in Scotland in the period. This history provides a two-fold excavation in order to show the under-recognised importance of Blackness in late twentieth-century Scottish writing. The first is of the significant work, particularly poetry and plays, of early Black Scottish writers Maud Sulter and Jackie Kay; and their relationship to national Scotland. The second is the expanding consciousness of Blackness both domestically and globally in the work of other Scottish writers such as Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, and Irvine Welsh.