Cultural Integration of Immigrants in Postwar Britain

In the aftermath of World War II, immigration became an issue of public concern in Britain with the beginning of the immigration from the Commonwealth countries and the (ex-) colonies, which was triggered by the demand for labour in the expanding postwar British economy as well as the far-ranging effects of the colonial and imperial structure. The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon, Second-Class Citizen by Buchi Emecheta and Sour Sweet by Timothy Mo, which come to be studied in the corpus of postcolonial literature and immigrant literature, mirror the experiences of the immigrants in Britain in those years through the eyes of first-generation immigrant writers. Cultural integration of Caribbean, Nigerian and Chinese-Cantonese immigrants portrayed in these novels is complicated and delayed with unpredicted troubles and challenges caused by ghettoisation, poverty, depravation, unemployment and underemployment, racism and discrimination, climate, and language during survival and adaptation.