She contends that in the discourse of wider debates on international immigration, words and phrases such as ‘“swamping”, “floods”, “tides” and “carriers of disease” are used to describe English incomers to Wales’s Welsh-speaking heartlands. She argues that these hostilities have partly led to the racialization of the divide between Wales and England, and argues that the language of debates surrounding multiculturalism, race and immigration is commonly used when discussing Anglo-Welsh relations. The first tier Williams identifies is that of Wales’s language divide between Welsh and English speakers in Wales, which seems to be closely associated with the second tier, that of hostility between the Welsh and English nations. Drawing on these tensions, Williams offers a three-tiered explanation of how, in her opinion, Welsh / English animosities have become the ‘real issue of Welsh racism’, obscuring the concerns of, or discrimination faced by, racial and ethnic minorities. It could be argued that these tensions came to a head when Gwynedd Plaid Cymru councillor Seimon Glyn was branded a racist for suggesting that the English language and culture were alien to this area of Wales, and that young people from local Welsh-speaking communities should be given priority over English incomers when it came to buying houses in a place where language and culture are under threat. Much of Williams’s most acknowledged and contested work emerges out of language tensions that arose in the early 2000s concerning English in-migration to Welsh-speaking communities in north Wales. Charlotte Williams’s sociological work stands at the intersection between these concerns, as she argues that the prominence given to issues of language and the issue of English in-migration to Wales means that more general issues of race, ethnicity and immigration are ignored. This debate has foregrounded issues pertaining to diversity more broadly, such as the participation or visibility of black or ethnic minority people in public life, as well as focusing on Wales-specific issues, such as English-Welsh relations, Wales’s status within the United Kingdom, and Welsh language rights and relationships between Welsh and English speakers. Locating Williams’s literary work amongst the work of other writers of contemporary fiction from Wales who attempt to re-imagine Wales’s relationship with its minorities, with England and with other countries worldwide, I hope to suggest that the multicultural Wales of contemporary fiction is far more complex than sociological studies would suggest, and advocates a more creative approach to expressing and promoting Welsh diversity.įor the past fifteen years, Charlotte Williams has been one of the foremost figures in the debate about Welsh multiculturalism. Sugar and Slate explores the binary relationships upon which Williams’s own identity are based, as well as that of Wales, and finds them inadequate. I suggest, too, that Sugar and Slate can also be read as an attempt to re-write the Welsh industrial novel in order to create a space for the black community in Wales’s past, examining Wales through its international links, as well as through its binary relationship with England. This hybrid text consists of prose, poems and letters, and echoes the slave trade through its movement between Wales, Africa and Guyana, as it teases out Wales’s own complex victim/oppressor status within the British Empire. Sugar and Slate is the site of a nuanced exploration of Williams’s own complex identity as an individual of mixed race and heritage in Wales. Her autobiographical novel, Sugar and Slate (2002), however, was more warmly received, and won Wales Book of the Year in 2003. Some of her claims have been widely discussed and have been met with criticism, particularly by campaigners and academics working in the field of Welsh language rights. Her widely-published, often collaborative research has opened up a space for discussion about multicultural Wales, obliterating the idea that the nation is wholly tolerant of ethnic diversity and suggesting that prominent ‘bicultural’ tensions between Welsh and English speakers, and between the Welsh and the English, arguably exclude minorities. Welsh academic and author Charlotte Williams has done much in recent years to inscribe the black voice onto the literary and cultural map of Wales. With news that Professor Charlotte Williams is to be appointed the head of a working group to improve the teaching of BAME history in schools in Wales, Wales Arts Review republishes from our archive this 2014 essay by Dr Lisa Sheppard on the importance of Williams’s work to a multicultural understanding of Wales’s past, present and future, focussing on her 2003 Wales Book of the Year-winning autobiographical ‘novel’, Sugar and Slate (2002, Planet Books).
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