(2016) 'Is Who Send We Up In This Place?' Threshold Paralysis and Postponed Arrivals in Sam Selvon's Lonely Londoners and George Lamming's The Emigrants (original) (raw)
Related papers
2016
The Literary London Journal, Volume 13 Number 1 (Spring 2016) Abstract: 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 derive 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 derive, 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 t...
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.
Comparative Critical Studies. Volume 11, Issue supplement, 77-92. This article examines the challenge to colonialist centre-periphery relations in post-war novels by white British and Caribbean writers. Concentrating on the relationship between political debates surrounding mass immigration and the marginalization of non-white migrants within British communities, I analyse texts that depict the threshold of the home as the politicized site of racial tension, namely Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956), V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men (1967), Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), and Anthony Burgess’s The Right to an Answer (1960). In varying ways, these texts depict the durability of centre-periphery relations at local levels through the informal segregation of the colonizer and the colonized. In doing so they point to what Jacques Derrida has outlined, in Of Hospitality (2000), as the power relationship inherent in policies of immigration, whereby the host-nation remains in control of the conditions upon which hospitality rests.
Migrant Literature and/as Cultural Change: The Case of "London Is the Place for Me"
REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, Vol. 32: Literature and Cultural Change, ed. Ingo Berensmeyer, Herbert Grabes, and Sonja Schillings (Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto, 2016), 289-306, 2016
In this essay, Lord Kitchener's calypso song "London Is the Place for Me" (1948) serves as an exemplary case study for an investigation into how migrant literature relates to cultural change. My hypothesis is that London texts by authors from British colonies or former colonies allow us to approach the cultural consequences of immigration not as an accomplished fact, but as an ongoing process; they give us a glimpse of cultural change in the making. I argue, moreover, that migrant literature about London does more than passively reflect social conditions: it actively engages in the transformation of culture. At the level of plot, it does so by using its fictional characters and situations to create (and experiment with) forms of cultural change; and at the level of form, it does so by performing cultural change by means of language, imagery, narrative strategies. My reading of "London Is the Place for Me” draws on Michel de Certeau's understanding of "practice" (particularly the practice of "using" cities) as a form of creative "appropriation." Contrary to most previous uses of de Certeau's work in the field of postcolonial studies, I apply his concept of "practice" not only to the characters in the text, but also to the texts themselves, arguing that both turn the "Concept-city" of London into a "metaphorical city." As the characters "appropriate" parts of the city, they reflect their authors' own creative uses and metaphorizations of London.
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.
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...
Introduction: Genres, Poetics and Subjectivities of Migration
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2023
If it is true that no person ever experienced exactly the same as another, it is also true that no person ever experienced something that did not resemble someone else’s experience. Speaking of genres of migration literature is to acknowledge that experiences of migration resemble each other. Speaking of distinct poetics informing specific genres of migration literature acknowledges that evocations of different shared migratory experiences each tend to be represented by specific topoi and literary means. Different periods have given rise to different similarities and produced specific subgenres and poetics of migration literature. This is, in a nutshell, the reason why the contributors to this issue came together at the conference “Subjectivities of Migration: Poetics and Genre in the Literary Imagination of Migrant Experience since 1989” at the Barenboim-Said Akademie Berlin in September 2021. The present issue of Interventions presents selected papers from the conference in substantially revised and extended form.