From the 1970s to the 1790s and the importance of metanarratives

Abstract

This address to a conference on ‘the exotic’ in nineteenth-century drama examines the cultural impact of slavery, and the resistances to it, on the English cultural imagination. From her perspective as both a researcher and a long-standing member of the Institute of Race Relations’ staff, the author explores the persistence of such an impact, and relates it both to the present day, and a key period of attempted cultural/political transformation, the 1970s.