At Home in the Diaspora: Domesticity and Nationalism in Postwar and Contemporary Caribbean-British Fiction
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
University of Rhode Island DigitalCommons@URI Open Access Dissertations 2015 AT HOME IN THE DIASPORA: DOMESTICITY AND NATIONALISM IN POSTWAR AND CONTEMPORARY CARIBBEAN-BRITISH FICTION Kim Caroline Evelyn University of Rhode Island, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss Recommended Citation Evelyn, Kim Caroline, "AT HOME IN THE DIASPORA: DOMESTICITY AND NATIONALISM IN POSTWAR AND CONTEMPORARY CARIBBEAN-BRITISH FICTION" (2015). Open Access Dissertations. Paper 301. https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss/301 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@URI. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@URI. For more information, please contact [email protected]. AT HOME IN THE DIASPORA: DOMESTICITY AND NATIONALISM IN POSTWAR AND CONTEMPORARY CARIBBEAN-BRITISH FICTION BY KIM CAROLINE EVELYN A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND 2015 DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DISSERTATION OF KIM CAROLINE EVELYN APPROVED: Dissertation Committee Ryan Trimm Naomi Mandel Rae Ferguson Nasser H. Zawia DEAN OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND 2015 ABSTRACT This project investigates the ways in which home is conceptualized and represented in sixty years of the literature of the Caribbean diaspora in Britain by balancing texts from the post-World War II period with contemporary texts and considering how the diaspora has been imagined and reimagined. Making a home of a diaspora—typically considered as a collection of scattered and ostracized migrants— requires a conceptual leap, act of agency, and, sometimes, a flight of imagination. Through the imagery of domesticity and the rhetoric of nationalism, literary analyses of representations of diaspora allow us to explore the imagined constructs of diasporic homes. This project explores how each presents a way of claiming a place as home and illustrates the literary tradition’s meaningful focus on migrants’ ability to create homes or to claim oppression-resistant spaces and lay claim to the nation. In doing so, these texts illustrate that instead of necessarily being a marker of displacement, the diaspora has the potential to provide a sense of home to people removed from their countries of origin. After the Second World War, migration from the British West Indies (the contemporaneous term) to Britain, the “mother country,” increased unprecedentedly as Britain held out the promise of belonging through its colonial hegemony and legal British nationality for colonial subjects, yet migrating black British subjects were overwhelmingly socially excluded. The governmental, political, and popular rhetoric of this exclusion contributed to the level of racism migrants encountered in all areas of life and by 1962 they had been reframed and redefined as invasive foreign immigrants through the debates, bills, acts, memoranda, government reports, editorials, and biased reporting. The literature of the Caribbean diaspora in Britain takes this up as a central thematic concern and, in representing the diaspora, depicts it as shaping Caribbean and black British identity while providing insight into a remarkable confrontation between colonial subjects and colonial power. Literary criticism concerning diaspora texts often focuses on psychological exile, authenticity, or the immigrant writer as a privileged intellectual abroad. Diaspora studies inclusive of the British Caribbean diaspora tend to fall into two groups: those with sociology-based foci on the dispersal of peoples longing for their nations of origin; or cultural studies-based examinations of the significance and experience of nation and multiculturalism. The cumulative result of these approaches has been an emphasis on fragmentation or rupture. This is important, yet the literature of the Caribbean diaspora also represents displacement as potentially unifying as the diaspora itself becomes a home to its members. “At Home in the Diaspora” rethinks experiences of diaspora and contends that migration is not plainly a matter of displacement because diasporic connections complicate the ways in which we can understand displacement. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful for the insight and support of my Dissertation Committee: Professor Ryan Trimm, my Major Professor, and Professor Naomi Mandel, Professor Rae Ferguson, Professor Gitahi Gititi, and Professor Vanessa Quainoo. I have been extremely fortunate to work with faculty who are so dedicated to excellence in student scholarship. I am also grateful for the inspiring confidence in me that Professor David Faflik and Professor Stephen Barber have shown. I also thank Michelle Caraccia for her help over the past several years. Without the committed staff of the URI Robert L. Corothers Library this work would not have been possible. I am an appreciative recipient of a University of Rhode Island Graduate School Fellowship (2013-14) and extend my thanks to the Graduate School for the privilege of that award. The fellowship allowed me to spend a significant amount of time dedicated to researching and writing this dissertation project. In 2014, the University of Rhode Island Center for the Humanities awarded me a Graduate Research Grant, which allowed me to continue my research at the British National Archives and the British Library; for this I am very thankful. I am also very grateful to the URI College of Arts & Sciences Richard Beaupre Hope & Heritage Fund for support that enabled me to travel to share my work at conferences. Additionally, I extend my appreciation to the Northeast Modern Language Association for accepting my suggestions for panels that allowed me to work with other scholars involved in similar work. I am also very grateful to Professor Ocasio Rafael and the editors of South Atlantic Review where a version of the first chapter of this work will be published in Spring 2015: “Claiming a Space in the Thought-I- iv Knew-You-Place: Migrant Domesticity, Diaspora, and Home in Andrea Levy’s Small Island.” I am forever grateful to the students I have worked with at The University of Rhode Island in English and in Writing & Rhetoric courses for helping me foster spaces for invigorating thought. I am deeply grateful to my partner, Michael D. Becker for his support, for challenging my thinking, for celebrating my accomplishments along the way, and for making a fulfilling home with me. I am more at home in the world than ever. I would also like to express my thanks to my sister, Laurin Evelyn for her fresh perspective and brash wit, and to my parents, Paul and Jennifer Evelyn, for teaching us to do our best and for their unending support in helping me realize my goals. I am also immensely grateful for the many kindnesses of my closest friends: Sara Murphy, Don Rodrigues, Brittany Hirth, Dr. Gavin Hurley, Dr. Benjamin D. Hagen, Cristina Weatherhead, Leigh Weatherhead, Danielle Barker, and Natasha Farnum. v DEDICATION To Paul and Jen who have always done their best so that I can do mine. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract…………………………………………………………………………. ii Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………... iv Dedication………………………………………………………………………. vi Table of Contents………………………………………………………………. vii Introduction: Narrating and Navigating a Sense of Home……………………... 1 Chapter 1: Claiming a Space in the Thought-I-Knew-You Place: Trajectories of Domesticity, Diaspora, and Home in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and Andrea Levy’s Small Island........................................................................... 32 Chapter 2: A Diaspora of West Indians “Born in England”: George Lamming’s The Emigrants…………………………………………………………………... 72 Chapter 3: “My Heritage Forbade Me to Stand Still”: Political Identity, the State, and Welfare Homes in Beryl Gilroy’s Boy-Sandwich and Joan Riley’s The Unbelonging……………………………………………………………… 111 Chapter 4: Speaking Home and History: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Narratives of National Belonging……………………………………………… 155 Conclusion: Home Fictions…….……………………………………………… 193 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………. 198 vii Introduction Narrating and Navigating a Sense of Home Following the Second World War, British West Indian emigration to the “mother country” increased at an unprecedented rate and established the presence of a large West Indian diaspora in the UK. At the same time Britain attempted, in Robin Cohen’s words, “to bolster the myth of a racially exclusive [white] British identity,” (Frontiers 18). The conflict of these two worlds—the British political world struggling to define, reify, and defend the idea of a homogenous (white) Britain and the world of emigrant West Indians and other Commonwealth citizens pursuing new opportunities in Britain in the face of pervasive racist oppression—gave rise to new concepts of home, nation, and identity. The symbolic inaugural event of postwar Caribbean migration is the 1948 arrival of 492 West Indian migrants to Britain aboard the Empire Windrush. Using 1948 as a launching point, this project examines six decades of the literature of the Caribbean diaspora in Britain and issues of immigration, emerging black British identities, political rhetoric, and major politicized events over those decades informing it as a literary tradition. In “At Home in the Diaspora,” I investigate the ways in which home is conceptualized and represented in this literary tradition and argue that instead of necessarily