Maybe It's Because I’m a Londoner: Hanif Kureishi’s London Trilogy (original) (raw)
Related papers
Yaars in 1970s Suburbia: London in Hanif Kureishi’s Fiction
I: By discussing some aspects of Hanif Kureishi's novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), this essay attempts to bring to light some of the most significant changes that have occurred in London since the 1970s, notably the transformation of its ethnic map and the role of the immigrant community, as well as the spread of Muslim fundamentalism. Kureishi's skills in tackling highly debated issues such as race, religion, integration and identity give us a flavour of 1970s London, thus enabling us to attempt a comparison with today's post-7/7 London. Abstract II: Analizzando alcuni aspetti del romanzo di Hanif Kureishi The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), il presente saggio intende mettere in evidenza alcuni tra i più significativi cambiamenti verificatisi a Londra a partire dagli anni '70, in particolare la trasformazione della sua mappa etnica e del ruolo dell'immigrato, e la diffusione del fondamentalismo islamico. Kureishi analizza acutamente questioni cruciali come razza, religione, integrazione e identità, e ci fornisce un efficace spaccato della Londra degli anni '70, permettendoci di effettuare un paragone con la situazione della Londra attuale dopo i bombardamenti del 7 luglio 2005.
The Intelligible Metropolis: Urban Mentality in Contemporary London Novels.
Writings on the metropolis generally foreground illimitability, stressing thereby that the urban ultimately remains both illegible and unintelligible. Instead, the purpose of this interdisciplinary study is to demonstrate that mentality as a tool offers orientation in the urban realm. Nora Pleßke develops a model of urban mentality to be employed for cities worldwide. Against the background of the Spatial Turn, she identifies dominant urban-specific structures of London mentality in contemporary London novels, such as Monica Ali's »Brick Lane«, J.G. Ballard's »Millennium People«, Nick Hornby's »A Long Way Down«, and Ian McEwan's »Saturday«.
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.
London: A Psychic Landscaping of a Postmodern Metropolis as Dystopia
Since the cultural turn in human geography in the late 1980s, there has been a widespread consensus on the intelligibility of space and its interpretative necessity. 1 It denotes both a broader understanding of text, whose realm and medium stretch beyond the border of conventional language, and the epistemological significance of studies on topography, which will help to disclose complex and intersubjective meanings of spaces. In the following essay, I will adopt a close-reading approach to investigate the represented urban space of the post-Thatcher era in Patrick Keiller's Film London and its specific aesthetic means, which are deeply rooted in literary Modernism.
Postgraduate English a Journal and Forum For Postgraduates in English, 2001
In this paper I propose to discuss issues relating postmodern definitions of the city to the representation of the urban environment in two British postmodern novels, Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses and Iain Sinclair's Downriver. The particular issues I want to discuss in relation to these two novels are: i) specific definitions and characteristics of the postmodern metropolis; ii) relationships between space, time and social discourse as registered in the city; and iii) discussion of the point of observation from which the city can been viewed. I will argue that these two texts offer a new way of recording the urban experience, a "postmodern observing" of the city. Wandering through the theoretical space of the postmodern city Before looking at what could be said to constitute the postmodern metropolis, I want to discuss some relevant models of the city that help to distinguish between modernist and postmodernist constructions of the urban environment. Raymond Williams in his 1973 book, The Country and the City defines the city in opposition to rural habitation in terms of location, lifestyle and sense of identity. He suggests that the country/city dialectic is a recurring trope in English literature from the beginning of the industrial revolution to the middle of the twentieth century. This dialectic continues to interest English novelists even when the majority of Britain's population were living in urban environments, for example in Hardy's novels of the late 1890s, Lawrence's Nottingham novels, and Forster's novels of the first decade of the twentieth century. All these writers represent the city as an unnatural environment, one that is seen to be encroaching upon the Bentley
During my Erasmus + exchange year in Vienna, I had the opportunity to choose the course 'London Fictions: From Dickens to Zadie Smith.' As a final assignment, I had to write a critical reflection on a topic that is related to the course. I decided to explore the 'wordliness' of London because of my numerous visits and fascination with the capital city. I included personal experiences because I thought they were necessary for the reader's comprehension of certain ideas, connections and associations.
Rewriting the Space of Immigrant Diasporic Fiction in Hanif Kureishi’s Suburbia
Hanif Kureishi's novels have explored the space of multiethnicity in post-diaspora Britain's immigrant literature. By attempting to read the sense of hybridisation that a post-diasporic immigrant undergoes, Kureishi has consistently denied the relatively easier amalgam of the 'postcolonial' nomenclature. His debut novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) almost singlehandedly led to the advent of the contemporary generic strain of immigrant multiethnic literature that consists of such authors as Zadie Smith and Monica Ali. The present paper attempts to read into the biographical roots of Kureishi's novel as well as the thematic endorsements that he brings into his sense of Postcoloniality, hybridisation of cultures and multiethnicity in a postcolonial world. By introducing theoretical angularities from Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak and others, the paper is an attempt to read the text contextually as well as with its historicity.
'Fictions of the City' reviewed by Richard Hornsey
Over the last couple of decades, the critical investigation of the constitutive links between literature and urban modernity has been a steadily expanding field. Through ongoing interdisciplinary dialogues with cultural geography and urban cultural studies, literary scholars have become not only more aware of how various types of writing have made sense of the disjointed flow of metropolitan experience, but of their larger contributions to the formation of urban imaginaries and ongoing cultural debates about the meanings of city life. Matthew Taunton's Fictions of the City and David Welsh's Underground Writing are two welcome additions to this body of work. Both books set out to provide a historical survey of how literature (and in Taunton's case, film) has engaged with a particular aspect of the built urban environment -the mass housing of London and Paris, and the London Underground, respectively -while situating the texts they examine within wider conversations around speculative development and municipal civic policy. These two volumes have markedly different provenances; Fictions of the City is based on Taunton's recent PhD thesis, while Underground Writing has its roots in Welsh's considerable experience as both an employee of London Transport and a community oral historian. They thus arrive at contrasting moments in the two authors' careers and this has given each book its own set of qualities, which marks them apart in both style and tone.