Affective Citizenship: Gender and Narratives of Affiliation in Multi-Ethnic British Literature
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Affective Citizenship: Gender and Narratives of Affiliation in Multi-Ethnic British Literature by Benjamin Suzuki Graves A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Associate Professor Nadia Ellis, Chair Professor Ian Duncan Professor James Vernon Summer 2017 Affective Citizenship: Gender and Narratives of Affiliation in Multi-Ethnic British Literature Copyright 2017 by Benjamin Suzuki Graves 1 Abstract Affective Citizenship: Gender and Narratives of Affiliation in Multi-Ethnic British Literature by Benjamin Suzuki Graves Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Associate Professor Nadia Ellis, Chair This dissertation explores the vexed or thwarted longing for community shaping multi-ethnic British fiction from the 1970s onwards. I examine the work of five authors—Buchi Emecheta, Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, Alan Hollinghurst, and Jackie Kay—whose writings foreground the affective dimensions of British citizenship and the complex processes of affiliation and disaffiliation by which black, Asian, and queer Britons claim belonging in the imagined community of the nation. At a time when postcolonial literary studies increasingly privileges, without really interrogating, an idealized rhetoric of “conviviality,” the negative, anti-relational, and disaggregating emotions circulating in their works bring into uncomfortable focus the factors that undermine the forging of politicized identities and communities in black Britain. Their writings also converge in a discursive concern with what I call, after Edward Said, “affiliation,” a process in which citizenship claims are facilitated by prosthetic or proxy figures hailing from often remote cultural quarters, ranging from the English ice dancers Torvill and Dean to the American blues singer Bessie Smith. The alternative kinship structures explored by these writers register the shifting meanings of family in postwar Britain, beginning with the pathologization of the black family in the 1950s and 1960s and coalescing in recent years around a similar stigmatization of the Asian family. The literary treatment of male and female communities of contest in multi-racial Britain also registers authors’ attempts to resolve a crisis of self-definition caused by the rise and fall of “black” as a political identity in the years since the “Windrush” generation of Afro- Caribbean migrants in the 1950s. Drawing on the works of queer and affect theorists, my analysis especially foregrounds the gendering of affiliative communities. While narratives of cross-cultural and cross-historical affiliation 2 have the potential to disrupt normative ideologies of gender and domesticity, I also show how they indulge a sentimental narrative of women’s community predicated on cultural assumptions about women’s exemplary capacity for feeling. i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indebted to my committee members, Nadia Ellis, Ian Duncan, and James Vernon, for their guidance and support. Their expertise, engagement, and intellectual generosity benefited this dissertation in countless ways. I especially want to thank Nadia for coming on board late in the day, at a time when the project sorely needed rethinking. Ian and James deserve special thanks for sticking with this dissertation and its writer over the years. I am grateful to Sam Rifkin, Ken Mahru, and C.D. Blanton for seeing me through a difficult logistical process. I would also like to acknowledge the role of Gautam Premnath and Abdul JanMohamed in the early development of these ideas. My colleagues at Middlebury College have generously devoted their time reading and commenting on my work. I owe a special debt to Rachael Joo, Yumna Siddiqi, Leif Sorensen, Holly Allen, Maggie Clinton, Alex Ward, Edward Vazquez, Alexis Peri, and Joyce Mao, for sharing their work and allowing me to share mine in return. A very special thanks to Brett Millier, Cates Baldridge, and Marion Wells for their support and leadership as department chairs. I feel very lucky, as well, to have received the material support of Anna Harlan and Sheerya Shivers. This project would not have been completed without the love and support of my mother and father—Nobuko Suzuki Graves and Robert Graves. I cannot thank them enough for the encouragement and stability they have provided, and for making it possible for me to see this through. I have been waiting a long time, finally, to be able to thank Joyce Mao for everything she has done for me and everything we have done together. She and our children, Romy and Sinjin, fill me with pride and love every day. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Gendered Communities of Contest 1 1 Motherhood and Affective Citizenship in Second Class Citizen 14 2 Failure, Family, and Temporality in White Teeth 30 3 In the House of Falling Women: Figuring Femininity in Brick Lane 45 4 Queer Affinities: Alan Hollinghurst and Jackie Kay 62 Coda 82 Works Cited 85 1 INTRODUCTION Gendered Communities of Contest Edgy, uncomfortable, and openly hostile relationships between women figure prominently in Jackie Kay’s literary imagination. The Scottish poet and novelist, whose writings in other respects carve out important spaces for intimacy, community, and kinship among women, betrays a peculiar interest in situations where precisely those impulses go awry. Things start off well in her long poem “The Adoption Papers,” a semi-autobiographical tracing narrative told from the alternating perspectives of the daughter, the biological mother, and the adoptive mother. Differentiated by font and often interpenetrating one another, their words can initially be hard to keep apart, and this is partially the point. The opening sections establish continuities and overlaps between the three women’s psychological responses to the adoption. Kay pictures the biological mother as a young woman, nearly the age of the now grown daughter who seeks her; the two are described as “dead spits” and echo each other’s tastes in music and books.1 Meanwhile, the two mothers are also brought into imaginative proximity. They are both peripatetic figures, presented in mirrored journeys to and from the hospital, respectively. But more importantly they have both committed transgressions, one through a cross-racial romance and the other through a cross-racial adoption. Both acts elicit the condemnation of a racist community.2 By placing the three women on common emotional ground, Kay would appear to open up possibilities of reconciliation, forgiveness, and mutual understanding between them. Given the racial specificity of the three characters (the two mothers are white, whereas the daughter is biracial and identifies as black, her father being Nigerian) this possibility would also seem to sanction a liberal-multicultural narrative of hybridity or community cohesion. But the reader may notice that despite their overlapping voices, neither the daughter nor the adoptive mother actually speaks to the birth parent. Their voices drown out rather than address one another. Encounters with the biological mother never bodily take place but are instead presented in dreams. In the first of these, a nightmare, the adoptive mother imagines that her rival has returned to kidnap her child, leaving her “tweed hat” in the cot in exchange (Adoption Papers 19). Within the 1 Jackie Kay, The Adoption Papers (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1991) 19. 2 The critic most sensitive to the poem’s treatment of race and ethnicity is Valerie Popp. Popp explores Kay’s emphasis on the materiality of paperwork in order to show how the poem critiques and identifies “improper” alternatives to the racial essentialism underwriting official discourses of citizenship in Thatcher-era Britain. Valerie Popp, “Improper Identification Required: Passports, Papers, and Identity Formation in Jackie Kay’s The Adoption Papers,” Contemporary Literature 53.2 (2012): 292-317. 2 terms of the poem, the biological mother is dangerously unstable, given to infanticidal thoughts and fantastic hallucinations. When her daughter is born, she pledges to “suffocate her with a feather pillow” (13). After burying the clothes she had bought for the child, she sees the ground move and imagines suckling her “baby Lazarus” after she has exhumed herself and flown in through the window (18). In the climactic though again only dreamt reunion between the two, the biological mother throws her daughter’s photograph down a well—a threatening enough gesture in a poem that frequently confounds people with the textual artifacts associated with them. Kay places the birth mother’s infanticidal aggressions in an allusive frame encompassing the grand guignol films of Bette Davis, including Dead Ringer (1964), where a vengeful twin murders then assumes the identity of her more successful look-alike, and The Nanny (1965), where the aging Davis drowns a baby in a bathtub. “Maybe it’s really Bette Davis I want / to be,” the daughter ruminates, “the good twin or even better the bad / one or a nanny who drowns a baby in a bath” (26).3 As Katharine Cockin has argued, the end of the poem reinvigorates the presence and perspective of the daughter, who will not be done away with so easily.4 “Her sister said she’d write me a letter,” she says, but as the poem reaches its end it is clear the letter and the reunion will never come (34). So the fragile sisterhood of the three women devolves into mutual anomie and suspicion.5 Both Bette