Literatura Multicultural Británica: Englishness, Posguerra e Identidad Poscolonial en la Narrativa de Levy, Smith, Phillips y Warner

Literatura multicultural británica: Englishness y la narrativa de la inmigración

Multicultural British: (Englishness) WWII - shortage workers, 1948 Jamaican brought into UK = reconstruct industry and basic services. Immigrant movement = social/cultural changes. Till then colonial characters = monstrous/wild, irrational, animal-like or cannibals, purpose downgrading them, making them unfit for self-government, thus legitimating control. First immigrants = deconstruction of social and literary stereotypes.

Escritores y temas principales

Writers and themes: Bildungsroman to explore the protagonist’s risky change to an idealized mother country. Narratives of the first generation faced hard difficulties and were very close to their own country.

Andrea Levy

Andrea Levy: novel Small Island, about Jamaicans who joined the RAF. Focuses from different perspectives on the difficulties Britain faces in its changes: a vast empire with a self-enclosed individual culture, preserving a sense of Englishness, now becoming multicultural.

• Told from a white and black point of view = portrait of Britain in the 1940s.
• Historical: it tells us about significant world events and their social impact, seen through the prism of individual lives.
• Gives voice to the ignored Jamaican who served in the wartime RAF and returned with the first wave of immigrants.

Structure: polyphonic. Four voices (male, female, black, white) represent the cross-continental movements and the devastation brought by war. Each voice has a different register and mood, showing individual prejudices and misunderstandings rooted in racial issues.

The second-generation immigrants = better economic conditions and social advancement.

Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith: novel White Teeth. The central point of this novel is what it means to be English. To answer this question, the author takes up the lives of three immigrant families: a working-class Englishman, a black Jamaican immigrant, a Muslim family, and a third generation of German and Polish descent.

The novel displays the oddities and the distortion of fate and history that have resulted in a new concept of Englishness that directly mocks the established canon.

Reescritura del canon: Shakespeare y el colonialismo

Works like The Tempest legitimise Western superiority. Martine Warner rewrites the three native characters in her novel Indigo. She also points to the practice of throwing sick or dying slaves overboard.

Caryl Phillips

Caryl Phillips:

• Small Island (fragment: brooch = flies).
• Crossing the River: novel with no linear plot, a juxtaposition of fragments of the stories of a black slave’s children. Breaches in chronology, space and social environment = effect of a broken mirror, a reflection of the African diaspora = destruction of memory, land and family ties.
• The Nature of Blood: historical novel. Past and present intertwine, combining different sources with unrelated places and times: a Jewish refugee camp in Cyprus and an extermination camp in Germany. Its structure is elliptical and spiral, moving forward to the present while continuously turning toward and around events in the past, as it explores distant countries and cultures.

Narradores y técnicas narrativas

Narrators: first, second and third-person narrative voices, intradiegetic and heterodiegetic. Direct report and free indirect styles. Polyphony of voices: each voice is defined in relation to every other but at the same time remains perfectly distinct.

Características de la novela histórica postmoderna

Important feature of the postmodern historical novel: rewriting events from the point of view of those ignored and silenced by traditional history. This novel exposes women’s exclusion from power and their status as victims of social organisation = Desdemona, Othello.