Gosh, another nearly six months have passed since my last post, but then I have been otherwise occupied! How so? Well, at last my book has been published and while I will write more about it in my annual review for this year at the end of the month, right now I can do no better than reproduce the publishers` plug here below:
https://www.austinmacauley.com/author/shah-ramnik
Ramnik
Shah is a critic and commentator and over the years has written
extensively in various legal journals, national newspapers and elsewhere
on, among other things, migration and diaspora-related issues. Although
now long retired from professional practice as an English solicitor, he
continues to pen articles, blogs, book and film reviews and other
material in different forums. He is on the editorial board of Bloomsbury
Professional’s Journal of Immigration Asylum and Nationality Law and a
regular columnist and contributor in AwaaZ, a cultural magazine
published in Nairobi, Kenya.
This is a unique and varied collection of
writings, spread over a half century, on wide-ranging subjects under the
banner of a child of the British Empire. On its metropolitan home
front, the Empire is of course long gone, with little left by way of
folk memory. While it does not figure in our national conversation much,
its legacy still lives on in many forms. More to the point, its
historical significance is now being increasingly invoked and revived by
writers with an immigrant background.
This selective
compilation falls into that genre. It is not a fictional narrative of a
singular journey from out there to here, as it were, but rather a
kaleidoscopic overview of the postcolonial movement into Britain of the
East African (EA) Asians from a variety of historical, legal and
cultural perspectives. This is encompassed in a mix of articles,
magazine columns and other material and in the numerous letters in The
Times and other newspapers. All these deal with different aspects of the
whole EA Asian and indeed global migration phenomenon. Buried in there
are snippets of the author’s own trajectory from birth in colonial Kenya
to eventual settlement in the UK. The texts also delve into his broad
hinterland through an eclectic array of book and film reviews, blogs,
travelogues and academic papers.
Empire’s Child provides a fascinating glimpse into the making of Britain’s multicultural society.
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