Sarah Ilott is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at Teesside University, UK. Her main research and teaching interests are in postcolonial literature and twenty-first century British literature. She has published journal articles on postcolonial literature and multicultural screen comedy, and has taught at Lancaster University – where she gained her PhD in 2013 – as well as at the University of Birmingham.
This book traces the shifting politics of race in contemporary Britain through analysis of screen comedy that has worked to parrot, cloak or confront racist discourse. Moving from 1950s minstrelsy through to contemporary streaming-era content, Ilott demonstrates how race is made and unmade through screen comedy’s engagements with the tacit (and often racist) premises of British multicultural discourse.
This study analyses four new genres of literature and film that have evolved to accommodate and negotiate the changing face of postcolonial Britain since 1990: British Muslim Bildungsromane, gothic tales of postcolonial England, the subcultural urban novel and multicultural British comedy.