Maybe It's Because I’m a Londoner: Hanif Kureishi’s London Trilogy (original) (raw)

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Abstract

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The analysis explores Hanif Kureishi's depiction of London in his London Trilogy, consisting of The Buddha of Suburbia, The Black Album, and Something to Tell You. It examines Kureishi's unique positioning as a postcolonial writer and his portrayal of the city as a site of cultural negotiation and transformation. The trilogy is analyzed for its candid representation of London's socio-economic changes over the last four decades and the complexities of identity within this modern metropolis.

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.

Re-Writing the City: Postmodern Observing in the Imaginary Londons of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses and Iain Sinclair's Downriver

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

A Critical Reflection: The “worldliness” of London: Personal perception, connotations and reconstruction.

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.

The Lure of Postwar London

The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing

In pursuit of the English, Doris Lessing's memoir of her years as a penniless writer newly arrived in postwar London, she recounts an anecdote when a friend from Cape Town accosts her with, 'Hey, Doris, man... how are you doing and how are you getting on with England?' Lessing's riposte was, 'I don't think I've met any. London is full of foreigners'. In this account, London, after the Second World War, is a place of transnational, cosmopolitan population flows living cheek by jowl with working-class Londoners. The chapter moves across the three postwar decades presents a materialist history of London as it grappled withhowever fitfully and unevenlythe legacy of empire. In addressing the diverse and discrepant material histories of broadcasting, cultural organisations, publishing, bookselling and bookshops this chapter describes the multivarious experiences connecting local spaces with global cultural production, all within commercial, social, educational and political imperatives. 'The lure of postwar Londons' cannot but give a selective portrait of London during these decades but such a narrative is vital for understanding the role that individuals and organisations have in creating a cosmopolitan city space. Radio Days Because of its ability to reach beyond its broadcast location, transforming print into the spoken word and hence widening its reach, radio is perhaps the most logical place to begin. At once real and virtual, the airwaves constitutes an imaginary space that makes material and substantive London's presence and its connection with other far-flung spaces. Debates over postwar programming at the BBC were marked by contradictory pulls towards and away from the Commonwealtha 'continuing adjustment to imperial decline'; 'public apathy' towards the Commonwealth in favour of Europe; anxieties regarding the rise of American cultural and political influence (Potter, 2012: 201-2)the BBC Caribbean Voices was no different in embeddedness in a Reithian value system and a new more regional, decolonising transnationalism. Many scholars have explored the impact on the literary landscape of the Caribbean on the BBC's

Introduction: Tracing the Urban Imaginary in the Postcolonial Metropolis and the 'New' Metropolis

Journal of Postcolonial …, 2011

This issue is special in the sense that it simultaneously explores the topicality, topography, topology and typography underlying the wide range of the "urban imaginary". This is to say, the aesthetic investments characterizing the textures of literary representations of the postcolonial metropolis and/or what we call the "new" metropolis. Although the very concept of the metropolis "has been used in contexts of colonial and imperial and postcolonial criticism" (Farías and Stemmler 12), recent scholarship dealing with urban literature has mainly focused on London as the former colonial centre (

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.

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References (60)

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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«.

The Migrant and the City: Literary Representations of Public, Private, and Imagined Migrant Experience in London

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.

Bittersweet London Chapter 12: Dawn after a long and dark London night

Bittersweet London , 2020

In light of the renewed interest in the events in London Borough of Greenwich in relations to the racial murders and the rise and fall of the far right wing British National Party (BNP), I am sharing the first of several chapters of my third-person autobiography Bittersweet London. In this chapter I, as Sanjay, outline how I had initiated and developed two crucial policy documents in London Borough of Greenwich to address racism in the borough. I also write my role as an anti racist professional and a politician leading to my election as an elected councillor in the London Borough of Greenwich Council in 1990.

Mantas N. (2011), Defining Postcolonial London: The case of Stephen Frears’ “Dirty Pretty Things”

This essay is organised around two main axes. The first axis is entitled “Defining London” and aspires to deal with the understanding of contemporary London’s identity though a brief but essential historical overview. The words “colonial” and “postcolonial” are adjectives used here to define two chronological periods. London during the colonial period was very different from postcolonial London. London’s identity of colonial and postcolonial period is detected at the space and the citizens’ attitude of the city. After the presentation of the imperial London in colonial period and the global city of London in the postcolonial era, contemporary London seems to be a hybrid product of both colonial and postcolonial period. The second axis has as title “Stephen Frears’ London in ‘Dirty Pretty Things’” and tries to trace the contemporary filmic London. From the connection between the Film Studies and the Urban Studies that brings together the film and the city to the representation of London in cinema and the case study of Stephen Frears’ film “Dirty Pretty Things”, this axe seeks the -previously defined- contemporary London.

(Disclaimer: I do not own this paper) Idealism to Realism- Representing London in Black British Writing: Reading Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners

Black British Literature is the by product of the struggles and dislocations witnessed by the black immigrants who invaded Britain in search of greener pasture and in the pursuit of the Golden Fleece. It comprises of the literature written in English by Caribbean, African and Asian writers emanating from immigrants from colonies formerly colonized by Britain. These writers have something in common which is their disillusionment with Britain, especially London and what it has to offer. Also is their bitter anger and expression of the hardship, brutality, molestation, oppression, self denigration, exploitation and discrimination meted on them by the British as well as their feeling of alienation, cultural dislocation and their struggle for self identity, discovery and survival. This literature captures Britain in its transformational stages and could pass for social documents from which the history of Britain, the Copyright © IAARR 2011: www.afrrevjo.com 44 Indexed African Journals Online: www.ajol.info society that gave birth to the future which today has become present, could be obtained. Samuel Selvon is one of the Caribbean writers who devoted a greater time of his life writing about the injustices, hardships, inhumanity, discriminations and agonies which characterize the life of an average immigrant in London.

Bombay/‘Wombay’: Refracting the Postcolonial Cityscape in The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture: Celebrating Impurity, Disrupting Borders, 2012

Ana Cristina Mendes, “Bombay/‘Wombay’: Refracting the Postcolonial Cityscape in The Ground Beneath Her Feet,” in Ana Cristina Mendes (ed.), Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture: Celebrating Impurity, Disrupting Borders. New York and London: Routledge, 158-181. This essay focuses on the ways images of Bombay are in the writer Salman Rushdie’s case bound to affective practices. Besides addressing the issue of photography as representation and affective practice, a correlated purpose of the chapter at hand is to bring together two apparently unconnected texts, penned more than half a century apart by two seemingly unrelated authors: Benjamin’s essay on the project of European modernity epitomised by the city of Paris under the Second Empire – ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’ – and Rushdie’s novel, set during its first half in the Indian metropolis of Bombay depicted as an example of a former European colony in belated quest of a modernity disavowed by colonialism. This image of Bombay, today one of the vast megalopolises that are contributing to reconceptualize the idea of the city, is the rationale for the present brief incursion into the meanings of the city in modernity. Even if an European city might appear an atypical starting point for addressing the representation of an Asian postcolonial city, the essay ‘Paris, the Capital’ can productively act as a counterpoint to Rushdie’s text chiefly because Benjamin’s Paris, the urban centre of European modernity, generates in itself a discourse that might be transposed to postcolonial urban contexts.