NEW POSTCOLONIAL BRITISH FICTION
• White Teeth (2000): representation of a London where mixed
white and non-white immigrant parents are a given
• London = mix of cultures, religions, languages and previous
nationalities
• Birth of a new postcolonial British fiction: Hanif Kureishi’s
The Buddha of Suburbia (1990)
• Recent example of the sub-genre: Monica Ali’s Brick Lane
(2003)
• Early postcolonial literature: the writers could still remember
their countries of origin and remained ambivalent about their
identity and allegiances
• New postcolonial literature: the writers only know a London
characterized by multiculturalism and residual racism
THE EMPIRE WINDRUSH (1948)
A CRISIS OF NATIONAL IDENTITY
• 1948: the Empire Windrush lands at Tilbury with almost
500 West Indian immigrants → crisis of British national
identity
• Earlier waves of migration had brought differences of
culture and language, but not of race and color
• Divestment of Britain’s colonies → racist backlash at
immigrants arriving from former subject colonies
• 2001: over 4.6 million (7.9%) of the total population of
59.2 million was non-white, of which 53% was Asian;
“mixed ethnicity”: 15% of the non-white population
(1.2% of the total population); London: 53% of the UK’s
non-white population (29% of the city’s inhabitants)
• Second generation immigrants, born and raised in
England → new British citizens
MULTIETHNIC LONDON(S)
Salman Rushdie Iis the most influential writer who deconstructs the
essentialist notions of national identity; he centers the London chapters
of The Satanic Verses (1989) in Brickhall (actually Southall, with a
predominantly Asian population), Kureishi uses West Kensington in The
Buddha of Suburbia and Kilburn in The Black Album (1995), Monica Ali in
Brick Lane focuses on Tower Hamlets (where a quarter of Britain’s
Bangladeshis live). Smith chooses Willesden Green in White Teeth (2000)
Englishness = inevitably involving ethnic multiplicity → racism = symptom of
the reluctance to accept the new hybrid nature of Britain’
V.S. Naipaul: first-generation immigrant who spent his life “Finding the
Centre” (the title of two autobiographical narratives, 1984); vs. secondgeneration writers: the periphery becomes the center, and their liminal
positions puts them both within and outside the many cultures they
explore in their fiction
Monica Ali , “Real Lives”: (2003) “Growing up with an English mother and a
Bengali father means never being an insider. Standing neither behind a
closed door, nor in the thick of things, but rather in the shadow of the
doorway, is a good place from which to observe”
Immigrant = modern Everyman, embodying the sense of being “immigrants”
which resides in all of us
SOUTHALL
WEST KENSINGTON
KILBURN
TOWER HAMLETS
WILLESDEN GREEN
POSTCOLONIAL SUBJECTIVITY
Postcolonial subjectivity (Gayatri Spivak and Homi
Bhabha): hybrid identities are negotiated through
performance; migrant identity can only be represented
in terms of difference
Stuart Hall:“what we call ‘the self’ is constituted out of
and by difference, and remains contradictory”
Racist and ethnic stereotypes of colonial discourse
attempt to deny the play of difference, but they cause
difference to act as an unconscious repressed that
returns to undermine the lingering colonial desire to
represent itself through its distinction from the
colonized other
A CONFUSED SENSE OF THE SELF
Frantz Fanon: the black ex-colonial subject is alienated from himor herself by a Manichaean delirium, split between a black
exterior and an assumed mask of white culture
Homi Bhabha: racism attempts to fetishize the subject by
denying the difference which constitutes poststructuralist
subjectivity
White Teeth: ambivalences and internal contradictions manifest
themselves in the migrant families, but also in the white
inheritors of the colonial legacy
Samad wants to be a true Muslim believer and to be Western by
having an affair with a white Englishwoman; Millat is torn
between subscribing to a militant branch of Islamic
fundamentalism and living out the fantasies of Western
heroism he has acquired from watching his favorite
Hollywood movies, Goodfellas and Scarface
NO MORE LONELY LONDONERS
• First Windrush generation → Sam Selvong, The Lonely
Londoners (1956): sense of bewilderment for not being
accepted by London
• Second-generation immigrants: exteriorization of their inner
conflicts → street riots and celebration of their contribution
to the national culture
• White Teeth: younger immigrant characters assume they are
as English as their white counterparts
• Office of National Statistics (January 2004): 87% of people
who identified themselves as of mixed ethnic origin described
their national identity as British
• On the other hand, impossibility to escape the shadow of the
colonial past
BUT ALL LONDONERS ARE MARGINAL
• White Teeth: all Londoners are marginal
• At the beginning, Archie is as split in his inner sense of
identity, and is in a liminal space between life and death
• Bhabha: “The borderline work of culture demands an
encounter with ‘newness’ that is not part of the continuum of
past and present. It creates a sense of the new as an insurgent
act of cultural translation . . . it renews the past, re-figuring it
as a contingent ‘in-between’ space, that innovates and
interrupts the performance of the present”
• Archie and Clara meet in a passage phase: his wife has just left
him, she has just left her mother: “had unhooked the old life,
he was walking into unknown territory,” not the “New” World,
but an intermediary space (Bhabha: “a return to the present .
. . to touch the future on its hither side”)
IDENTITY AND DIFFÉRENCE
• Stuart Hall:, identity “is constructed in or through différance and is
constantly destabilized by what it leaves out”
• Différance = difference + deferral (something which is “other” not only
because it is “not I,” but above all because it is a part of the I which is
removed, put at a distance, only to be inevitably encountered afterwards)
• Smith: difference is an effect of occupying any subjective position, not
simply an effect of two different forms of identification.
• Clara : mixed origins (Jamaican maternal grandmother, white colonial
grandfather) → identity = not a return to her roots, but a coming to terms
with her cultural routes (Paul Gilroy)
• White teeth = metaphor for one’s own identity (teeth are used for
identifying anonymous corpses) → Clara’s false teeth = deliberate
confusion of closed forms of identity
• Chalfens: attempt to impose closure on their sense of British identity,
denying the force of difference within their genealogy (but they are a
third-generation immigrant family – Irish Catholic and German/Polish
Jewish )
• Essentialization of ethnic identity → repression of the past containing the
mixed ethnicity of everyone
AN HAPPY MULTICULTURAL LAND
•
But the younger generation cannot escape the ties of history by simply leaving the
family home. History emerges in the novel as an inescapable component of
subjectivity constantly in process. Irie in particular longs to be rid of the long
shadow of history. According to Fanon, the colonial subject (or that subject’s
offspring) is always “overdetermined from without.” Near the end in her outburst
on the bus Irie voices a longing that all her generation share – to live without
having to hear about “everybody’s old historical shit all over the place.” But the
narrator is skeptical about the myth that immigrants enter their new country,
“Happy Multicultural Land,” “as blank people, free of any kind of baggage, . . .
merging with the oneness of this greenandpleasantlibertarianlandofthefree”. The
tautology alone (“Libertarian” and “free”) linguistically undercuts the clarity of the
myth of a multicultural melting pot. A careful reader will be warned by the
epigraph: “What is past is prologue,” uttered by Antonio in The Tempest (2.1.253).
By the time Smith stages the reunion of Millat and Magid they are too conditioned
by the past to reconcile their differences. Like the tortoise and Achilles in Zeno’s
paradox, “the two brothers will race toward the future only to find they more and
more eloquently express their past.” We are all fated to greater or lesser extent to
repeat the past, which does not mean that the past is all-determining.
PAST-TENSE, FUTURE PERFECT
The refrain “past-tense, future-perfect” represents “the
myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and
the future, perfect”: dream of all first-generation
immigrants that their life will be transformed once they
have entered the city where streets are paved in gold
Second-generation immigrants: condemned to reenact
their parents’ original trauma, “the dash they once
made from one land to another, from one faith to
another” → confused and confusing state of liminality,
neither one nor the other (but also possibility of being
both)
ROOT CANALS
Root Canals: metaphor of the connection between past (1857,
when Samad’s ancestor, Mangal Pange, unsuccessfully
attempts to assassinate his English superior officer, but
perhaps starts the first Indian mutiny; 1945, when Samad and
Archie begin their friendship serving in the same tank crew)
and present (London, 1974 to 1992)
Past = contested terrain, continually reinvented by the present
Chalfens = myth of the freedom from the past (Irie: they are
“unblocked by history, free”); but no one is free of history.
Stuart Hall: “cultural identities are . . . the unstable points of
identification or suture, which are made within the discourses
of history and culture. Not an essence but a positioning”
Smiths, Iqbals and Chalfens = identity as the always varying
positioning resulting from the negotiations between past and
present
STRANGERS IN A STRANGE LAND
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Younger generations: to-and-fro movement between the poles of assimilation
and cultural separatism
Irie: “There was England, a gigantic mirror, and there was Irie, without
reflection. A stranger in a strange land”; cf. Exodus, 2.22)
Millat “was neither one thing nor the other, this or that, Muslim or Christian,
Englishman or Bengali; he lived for the in-between”
In-between-ness = “crucial for the emergence of new historical subjects”
(Bhabha)
New generations: no memories of their country of origin → unlike Samad,
they do not regret that, having made the “devil’s pact” with the country of
emigration, “suddenly you are unsuitable to return . . . you belong nowhere”
Samad’s dystopia sounds “like paradise to her [Irie]. Sounded like freedom”
The in-between state, hybridity, does not have to be a choice between either
a clash or a syncretic merging of essentialist notions of cultures and races
All culture is constructed → “hybridity is about making meaning without the
repression of a pre-existing normativity” (Radhakrishnan)
Judith Butler: “Identifications are never fully and finally made; they are
incessantly reconstituted”