You Got a White Voice: Blackness in Devolutionary Scotland

Prabhu Guptara’s concise entry for Wilson Harris’s Black Marsden (1972), in his annotated bibliography of black British literature, describes it as simply ‘Harris’s first novel about blacks in Britain’.¹ While technically correct, the implication of this description minimises two of its important characteristics. The first is that ‘Britain’ does not do justice to the specificity of Black Marsden’s substantially Scottish setting, nor to its relationship to a Scottish literary tradition. Harris, an émigré author from Guyana, stated that the ‘strange subjectivity of the Scottish imagination’ is one with which he felt ‘at home’.² Scots in the Caribbean had already featured