Hosts and hostages: Mass immigration and the power of hospitality in post-war British and Caribbean Literature (original) (raw)
Related papers
Foreign in London: Diaspora as a traumatic experience in Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners
Ars Aeterna, 2018
Stuart Hall in Black Britain claims that “the experience of black settlement has been a long, difficult, sometimes bitterly contested and unfinished story.” Such is the case in Samuel Selvon’s 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners, which depicts the trauma of diaspora for West Indian newcomers. People from the Caribbean who settle in the “mother country” experience total disillusion because they are not welcomed by the white British. The paper focuses on the influence British politics has had upon the Windrush generation of immigrants. It shows how the characters cope with animosity, loneliness and the sense of failed promise that all lead to the traumatic experience of living in total isolation in a foreign city far from their native islands. The immigrants face xenophobia, suffer from being the “other”, invisible and segregated. They try to cope with the trauma of “not belonging anywhere”, i.e. being uprooted from their homes in the West Indies. In the aftermath of the decolonization pr...
A House with Two Doors? Creole Nationalism and Nomadism in Multicultural London
Culture, Theory & Critique, 2007
This article focuses on the limits of liberal discourses such as multiculturalism in an increasing global world. I examine multicultural London and juxtapose Black British writer, Zadie Smith’s novel, White Teeth to Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things, to underline the multiple intersections between the status of coloured immigrants, their descendants, and migrant workers. The thin distinction between citizens and aliens disappears in the film that portrays their overlapping job occupations, spatial proximity, hence shedding light on the continuing significance of race in Britain today. While racism in Smith’s liberal view can be combated through claims of citizenship, the film suggests that race, class, and immigrant statuses are an integral part of the capitalist machine. This comparison reveals different conceptualisations of the "other" london, one that is creole and argues for the recognition of diverse citizens’ cultures, and another one that transcends national, gender and cultural perimeters.
In Every Holt and Heath: Spatial Counter-Actions in Contemporary British Literature on Migrants
Le Simplegadi
Abstract II: Focusing on the literature on globalisation's migrants in contemporary Britain, this article examines the forms of spatial seclusion imprisoning these new slaves -be they refugees, asylum seekers or 'economic migrants'. More specifically, the contribution concentrates on the institutional forms of spatial imprisonment, highlighting their similarities with illegal exploitation. Works like Kay Adshead's play The Bogus Woman and collections on refugees such as Refugee Tales, Over Land, Over Sea and A Country of Refuge point to the ways in which migrants are brutally detained and at how subtler forms of institutionally-induced detention are disseminated through the country, while proposing counter-actions which aim at reimagining contested spaces. On this final aspect, the article identifies four main strategies: meta-literary, metaphorical, re-imaginative and re-appropriative.
This project investigates the ways in which home is conceptualized and represented in sixty years of the literature of the Caribbean diaspora in Britain by balancing texts from the post-World War II period with contemporary texts and considering how the diaspora has been imagined and reimagined. Making a home of a diaspora-typically considered as a collection of scattered and ostracized migrantsrequires a conceptual leap, act of agency, and, sometimes, a flight of imagination. vii
Representations of London life abound in contemporary British Black and Asian migrant fiction. Some are bleak, some conjure up images of an urban idyll, while others are frenetic and disturbed. Yet all of these fictional representations of London endeavour to make the city legible to us, to make it possible for us to find a way to read the city and understand something of its structure, protagonists, and plot. Depending on individual perspective, London can assume very different characters or personalities. This is an idea that ties in well with central concepts taken from those working in the area of Psychogeography. As Will Self has observed, Psychogeography is 'concerned with the personality of place itself'. 1 Psychogeographical ideas, therefore, may prove relevant to this exploration of literary representations of the relationship between London and the migrant. To what extent do our physical surroundings influence our emotional responses and behaviour? Psychogeography emphasises the connection between place and psychology. London, along with Paris, is acknowledged as one of the ultimate psychogeographical cities. It is also the setting for significant literary explorations of British Black and Asian migration. This paper will seek to apply key ideas of Psychogeography to the study of literary representations of migrant experience in the postcolonial metropolitan centre by authors including Zadie Smith, Hanif Kureishi, and John Healy. The character of the city of London in the postcolonial era is a key consideration when exploring literary representations of the Black and South Asian Diaspora. The writers in question explore the intricate connections between space, place, objects, emotion, and memory, and superimpose these themes onto fundamental explorations of postcolonial experience in contemporary Britain.
The article demonstrates how arrival in London is depicted in Samuel Selvon's The Lonely Londoners (1956) and George Lamming's The Emigrants (1954) as elusive or postponed. Using spatial theories put forward by Jacques Derrida, Michel de Certeau and the 1960s radical thinkers the Situationists, the article focuses on the concept of dérive and the threshold in both texts. It demonstrates that initially, as the English controlled the conditions of hospitality, Lamming and Selvon's protagonists are unable to traverse spatial and cultural thresholds and embrace their citizenship in London, which leads to a profound sense of loss. Using the central concept of dérive, or drifting, as defined by Derrida and the Situationists, the article then traces the divergent trajectories of Selvon and Lamming's protagonists, arguing that in The Lonely Londoners we see a movement away from this state of paralysis at the threshold towards limited but creative, playful and subversive movement, while in Lamming's text the emigrants struggle to find ways of redefining the dominant order. 'It was a punishing wind that drove us from looking at the landscape', wrote George Lamming, describing his first glimpse of the grey shores of Southampton in 1950. His fellow passenger, Sam Selvon, turned to him on the deck and asked: 'Is who send we up in this place?' (Lamming 2005: 212). Postwar migrants travelling from the Caribbean to Europe in the 1950s expressed the anticipation and anguish of exile through the development of unique new genres of literature and poetry. Narrative portrayals of moments of arrival
In this senior thesis, I have explored how post-colonial literature reflects the different effects of British colonialism in three different novels written by authors from three different countries. In his most famous novel The Lonely Londoners (1956), Trinidadian author Sam Selvon describes the first meeting of Londoners with the first generation of West Indian immigrants in Britain (“Windrush generation”). In this thesis, I have used A Small Place by Antiguan writer Jamaica Kincaid for comparison: The novel depicts post-colonial Antigua and its people’s approach towards the British nation as well as their approach to their own post-colonial situation. I have used a peculiar novel as the meeting point of these two novels: East, West by Salman Rushdie. East, West is a novel with three chapters, each chapter consisting of three short stories. The first chapter, “East”, gives the audience a depiction of post-colonial India whereas “West” describes Britain and, in general, criticizes the West after colonialism. The last chapter, “East, West” relates cross-border and cross-nation stories. In this way, I have analyzed the colonizing-colonized relationships in both the colonized countries and in the center of the British Empire. In order to criticize and -to some extent- historicize these three post-colonial novels, the first reference point I have used is, of course, Edward Said’s Orientalism. Since the aim of this senior thesis is to study how post-colonial literature dealt with the relations between the British nation and the colonized nations, I have used essays and critical texts by scholars and philosophers such as Homi K. Bhabha, Benedict Anderson, Theo D’haen, Gauri Viswanathan, Valerie Kennedy, Frantz Fanon, Timothy Weiss, Kenneth Ramchand, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Resisting Dominant Culture in the Lonely Londoners: A Critical Discourse Analysis
IJASOS- International E-journal of Advances in Social Sciences, 2019
This paper investigates the resistance of immigrants to cultural dominance of London society in The Lonely Londoners, a postcolonial novel by Sam Selvon. The Lonely Londoners (1956) depicts the miserable life of Caribbean people who migrated in hope to find better condition of living than their countries. The paper furnishes a theoretic ground for analyzing the discourse of the novel which presents the subject of resisting dominant culture throughout events and language used by the novelist. The paradigm of immigrants, their trauma and shock have always been the spot line of discussion after WWII. Through the colonial history there was a dominant discourse of Western cultural superiority imposed on colonized, with the postcolonial era a different discourse emerged through intellectual presentations such as Fanon, Said, Bhabha ideas and others who enlightened literary theory and criticism and theorized resistance and cultural identity. Thus, this paper will critically analyze the discourse of resistance of Postcolonial people in exile to ascertain their existence and identity.