Writing Against a Fixed Lexicon of Terrorism in Patrick Neate's
Yvonne Rosenberg ‘Stop Thinking Like an Englishman’ or: Writing Against a Fixed Lexicon of Terrorism in Patrick Neate’s City of Tiny Lights (2005) In a post-9/11 geopolitical climate, Tommy Akhtar, the protagonist of Patrick Neate’s novel City of Tiny Lights – published in 2005 shortly before the 7/7 bombings – lives a life of various identities in multi-ethnic London: a Ugandan-Indian, a ‘Paki’, an ex-mujahideen, Marlowe- wannabe, cosmopolitan, Londoner, and an Englishman. Yet, he always stays in the position of the immigrant because the often limited contemporary view of the other has led to the perception of internally homogeneous groups. In the course of the novel, it becomes clear how central the issue of fixed labels is in a society characterised by the linguistic and cultural need to taxonomise, securing apparently coherent identities. This article has two closely connected goals. The first is to discuss racial and cultural identity as metaphysical concepts, which inflammatory reporting, however, has often engrained in society as biological facts. The second and more important aim is to stress the need to re-formulate seemingly fixed concepts like alterity and terrorism in order to open up perception and to avoid racial stereotyping. Therefore, I will analyse the connection between the construction of meaning, the linguistic games and the cultural codes in Neate’s novel. London-born author Patrick Neate, who won the 2001 Whitbread Novel Award for his second novel Twelve Bar Blues, has a strong interest in writing about questions of identity, ethnicity, and racial discrimination. In his latest novel City of Tiny Lights1 he tackles problematic issues of contemporary multi- cultural metropolitan life, such as racialised anxiety and white narcissism, in a post-Chandleresque detective plot.
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