This close reading of Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) examines the author’s reworking of canonical modernist themes of anomie, ennui, and despair, as well as the typical eschewal of left politics Selvon shared with his literary forerunners, in the social encounters and consciousness of the novel's characters. Selvon's 'boys,' members of the 'Windrush Generation' of Afro-Caribbean migrants brought to Britain to fill postwar labor shortages, face everyday racism and structural discrimination from a socially exclusionary welfare state. Drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon, I show how the boys internalize the racialization and hatred they are subject to as abjection, setting them individually adrift in the industrial metropolis. More pointedly, I argue racialization and abjection forestall the possibility that the boys’ emotionally shallow relationships will coalesce into group identity and a political consciousness that would entail tactical resistance to racism and solidarity with other intersectionally oppressed groups. In The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) and After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture (2004), cultural theorist Paul Gilroy cautions against a similarly atomistic, hedonistic, and more violently nihilistic, Black identity, rooted in the revolutionary politics of the 1960s, that was transmitted to Britain through the global commercialization of U.S. hip-hop culture beginning in the late 1980s. This capitalist incursion further complicates questions about the forms of political consciousness and resistance available to Black Britons. Ultimately, I align myself with Gilroy’s formulation of late-postmodern conviviality as a means of overcoming both culturally dominant racial othering and the restrictive binary of political quietism and strategic essentialism in global Black thought.