Towards a black british fiction of memory: narrating the peripheral space of english identity in andrea levy ‘small island
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Date
2019
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Revue des sciences humaines
Abstract
The present paper aims at exploring how English identity is reconstructed through the narrative of memory in Small Island by the Black British writer Andrea Levy. It is argued that the narrative of this latter carries in its seeds a transnational memory that crosses the exclusive boundary of post-war identity that Britain underwent during the 1940s. This form of aesthetics has genuinely grounded the diasporic experience in the British cultural memory so that it became a warm home for the Caribbean immigrants of the Windrush Generation. Being written in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the novel highly contributes to enlighten contemporary multicultural Britain by creating multiracial sites of memory that function as new markers of British identity.
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Keywords
Black representation, Collective memory, English identity, Black British Fiction