Conclusion How Immigrant and Ethnic-Minority Writers Have Become a Vanguard of Cultural Change: Comparing Historical Developments, Political Changes and Literary Debates in Fifteen National Contexts
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Abstract
This chapter analyses immigrant and ethnic-minority writing as an international phenomenon. It first discusses the marginalisation of this writing in nationalised literatures. Subsequently, it explains how this marginalisation was overcome and how immigrant and ethnic-minority writing came to be regarded as a vanguard of cultural change. This process began in the 1960s in Anglophone contexts and, over the last 50 years, has reached first the larger, then the smaller European literatures, as well as those of Brazil and Japan. The chapter regards this process as having been set off by the same trigger in all the national contexts discussed here – the new ideology of equality of all peoples and races established after World War II. Moreover, it shows that the recognition of this literature was achieved faster in those contexts where equal rights for all people have become inscribed into the legal framework and the national imaginary.