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Homemaking As National Belonging in 20Th and 21St C. Black British Novels

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Homemaking As National Belonging in 20Th and 21St C. Black British Novels “Home is where you feel a welcome”: Homemaking as National Belonging in 20th and 21st c. Black British Novels A dissertation submitted by Cornelia C. Photopoulos in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English (PhD) Tufts University February 2020 Advisor: Modhumita Roy Abstract In “Home is where you feel a welcome”: Homemaking as National Belonging in 20th and 21st c. Black British Novels, I argue that through depictions of homemaking, black British novelists reflect and refract the possibilities for black British national belonging. I draw on Benedict Anderson’s foundational work Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, which has continued to provide a theoretical structure for understanding the nation as an ideological construct since its publication in 1983. Anderson argues that the nation as idea is disseminated through media; the cultivation of interpersonal ties within a shared locality, formerly the organizing principle of politics, is replaced by a collection of remotely disseminated national narratives. In this project, I expand upon, and challenge, Anderson’s formulation. Through their representations of homemaking, Joan Riley, Sam Selvon, Caryl Phillips, Andrea Levy, Bernardine Evaristo, and Zadie Smith produce narratives about Britain and black Britain, and thus imagine community in accordance with Anderson’s paradigm. However, the trope of homemaking, which centers the physicality of spatiality and embodiment, reflects the importance of the material to national belonging, refuting the notion that imagination alone can create or sustain the nation. The metaphor of the nation as “home” is continually complicated by the materiality of the house and its inhabitants. The implicitly white imperial British national imaginary that positioned England as “home” did ii not make ideological space for people of color, and often actively excluded them. The narrowness of the British national narrative in turn manifested in the real struggle for housing faced by black subjects in the United Kingdom. By foregrounding the irreducibly physical practice of homemaking, I argue that black British novelists are both asserting themselves as creators of the British national imaginary, and also demonstrating how the rhetoric of national belonging fails to contend with the embodied experience of belonging that the raced, classed and gendered practice of homemaking describes. iii Acknowledgements I would first like to thank my committee members, Sonia Hofkosh, H. Adlai Murdoch, and Nicole Aljoe, for their participation in my defense and for the productive feedback they provided. Their thoughtful and engaged commentary has given me much to think about as I continue to develop the ideas this project explores, for which I am grateful. I am also grateful for the support of my peers throughout graduate school. In particular, thanks to Shannon, Asha, Brad, and especially Gayathri for providing feedback on chapter drafts. Thanks to Margaret for much-needed coffee and conversation. Beyond the English department, Yara and Alexa were always there for moral support. Many thanks to my advisor, Modhumita Roy, for her support and guidance throughout my graduate career. Despite the unforeseen obstacles that popped up throughout the course of writing this dissertation, nevertheless, we persisted. My writing has been much improved, and my thinking better informed by the comments and conversations exchanged throughout this project. I would certainly never have been able to go it alone, and I am glad that I did not have to. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Harry and Barbara Photopoulos, without whose support my completion of the PhD would not have been possible. iv Table of Contents Introduction: “Home is where you feel a welcome”: Homemaking as National Belonging in 20th and 21st c. Black British Novels 1-50 Chapter 1: Inhabiting the Body as Owning Home: Gendered Embodiment and Home Ownership in Joan Riley’s Waiting in the Twilight and Samuel Selvon’s Moses Ascending 51-97 Chapter 2: Windrush Subjects: Marriage, Middleclassness, and Domesticity as National (Un)Belonging in Caryl Phillips’ The Final Passage and Andrea Levy’s Small Island 98-140 Chapter 3: Purchasing Propriety: Gentrification and Belonging in Bernardine Evaristo’s Mr. Loverman and Zadie Smith’s NW 141-191 Conclusion 192-200 Bibliography 201-222 v Introduction: “Home is where you feel a welcome”: Homemaking as National Belonging in 20th and 21st c. Black British Novels In embarking on this project many years ago, I began with the idea that the affective dimension of home as a place of comfort and belonging was at odds with the pragmatic realities of inhabiting a house. My observation of the disjunction between the ideal of home and the reality of housing arose during a seminar on black British novels. I began to notice common tropes in representations of black Caribbean migrants moving into houses in London. The carefully catalogued disrepair of the properties available, and the understandable dismay exhibited by the characters upon realizing how different their lives in London would be from what they had imagined back home, seemed to constitute shared conventions of what we could call “arrival literature.”1 In each novel I discuss, house and housing are used to represent both the material reality that black British characters face in inhabiting the racist social landscape of England, and the metaphorical place they occupy as British subjects who find themselves unwelcome in a place that they had been encouraged to think of as home. Representations of characters’ experience in these novels draw on the historical record: when black British subjects from the Caribbean migrated to England post-World War II, they found that they were suddenly seen as black, not British. The illusion of imperial belonging, promulgated in order to keep colonial subjects placated with the knowledge that they were important contributors to a powerful global force, 1 The depiction of migrants’ arrival in the UK is a common trope in black British literature, of which Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) is perhaps the most iconic example. 1 proved to be a lie. The national imaginary of empire expanded and contracted depending on one’s race and place, and this shifting definition manifested most forcefully in housing discrimination. As I argue in this dissertation, the practices of shaping the national imaginary through the inclusion or exclusion of subjects spatially is intimately interconnected with media dissemination of ideas about the nation. Framing immigration policy in terms of its connection to housing insufficiency positions migration as a proxy for race, and presents the exclusion of black British subjects as justifiable on the pretext that there is simply not enough space for them in England: they would be better off going back “home.” The imperial British national imaginary presented itself as one big happy family when people of color kept to their respective colonial places, but became inhospitable when they migrated to the imperial center, which was imagined as white. Black Britons’ difficulties accessing housing has, therefore, been used by black British writers to represent the inability to be ‘at home’ in empire and its aftermath. I analyze six black British novels written between 1975 and 2014, all of which explore the idea of national belonging through representations of homemaking and homeownership in London. The novels I consider are Joan Riley’s Waiting in the Twilight (1987), Sam Selvon’s Moses Ascending (1975), Caryl Phillips’ A Final Passage (1985), Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004), Bernardine Evaristo’s Mr. Loverman (2014), and Zadie Smith’s NW (2012). The list is representative rather than exhaustive: in each of these novels, a black protagonist attempts homemaking in London, the heart of the former British 2 Empire.2 I ask how, and why, these characters succeed or fail in their quest for national belonging, and why domestic space is the arena in which they pursue it. Because “home” conjoins materiality and affect, homemaking as a practice involves both making do with material circumstances, and striving toward aspirational ideals. The barriers to homemaking and homeownership, as the novels show us, are manifold, and include factors such as institutional racism, sexism, and financial inequity, amongst others. Added to these is an issue I will explore in greater depth, especially in the last chapter: the turn away from the very idea of housing as a social good to which citizens have a fundamental right, toward the embrace of private property ownership. This crucial ideological shift began under Margaret Thatcher and becomes “common sense” (Harvey, 39) under New Labour and Tony Blair.3 These novels thus chart, with varying degrees of criticism or acceptance, the rise of neoliberalism’s valorization of privatization, particularly private property, transforming “homes” into economic assets. I restrict my focus to novels of homemaking in London, and to characters of Caribbean heritage, rather than of South Asian or African descent. Though some of the same issues of finding a place to live in the UK could apply broadly to all migrants and their descendants, the West Indian instance is of particular relevance in exposing the racism of the British national imaginary. As Dilip Hiro, among others, have noted, Caribbean subjects who arrived in Britain carried with them a shared sense of British identity,
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