Title: Biopolitics, Borders and the Populations of Literary Space in Two Post-millennial Black British Novels: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea and Andrea Levy’s The Long Song Student: Marie-Therese Ryan Course: MKH05 MLitt Department of English, Maynooth University Date submitted to Maynooth University: 26th February 2016 Head of Department: Prof. Emer Nolan Supervisor: Dr. Íde Corley Ryan 1 Table of Contents 1.Introduction ........................................................................................................ 3 2.Biopolitics and Migration in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea ............................................................................................ 22 3.Biopolitics, Literary Space and Geographies of Domination in Andrea Levy’s The Long Song .................................................. 69 4. Conclusion .................................................................................................... 136 Ryan 2 Abstract This project is an analysis of biopolitics, populations and space in two post-millennial black British novels: Adbulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea (2001) and Andrea Levy’s The Long Song (2010). In chapter one, I examine the regulation and control of migrant and asylum seeker populations in twenty-first century Britain in By the Sea. The novel underlines the ways in which the biopolitical regulation of bodies in both geopolitical and literary space creates a hierarchical concept of the human. Drawing on seminal texts on biopolitics from Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, I explore the spatial and racial management of migrant bodies and, also, the ways in which the movements of migrants form a positive biopolitics, undermining the bureaucracy of the state’s immigration controls. Ultimately, the novel suggests that the movement of populations creates transnational affiliations which deconstruct essentialist categories of identification. Chapter two examines the spatial management of slaves on the colonial plantation in The Long Song. This chapter is also concerned with literary space and explores the role of colonial literatures such as slave narratives, missionary pamphlets and travelogues, in creating and reinforcing racial hierarchies. Specifically, Levy’s novel engages intertextually with the slave narrative The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831) in order to demonstrate how the black female subject was constructed through literature. In addition, by comparing black and white women’s publications in the nineteenth century, Levy’s novel emphasises the power of white women to map the material space of the plantation and filter the narrative of colonialism in their novels and travelogues. Contrastingly, black women’s movements were curtailed by white planters and their writing was also carefully framed and edited by white publishers. Finally, I argue that Levy’s novel remaps the plantation space by providing a counter-narrative of slavery which undermines official historiography. Ryan 3 1. Introduction This study focuses on two post-millennial novels by black British authors: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea (2001) and Andrea Levy’s The Long Song (2010). The novels differ from each other in various ways. The Long Song describes the life of a female slave on a Jamaican sugar plantation in the nineteenth century and By the Sea depicts the life of a Zanzibari asylum seeker in twenty-first century Britain. While By the Sea is mainly realist in form, The Long Song is related in a grotesque, parodic mode. However, both novels illustrate the effects of colonialism on British society. Equally, they undermine the concept of a homogenous British identity by emphasising the ways that contemporary British culture has been shaped by myriad of ethnicities and multicultural influences. In particular, both novels underline the contributions of people from Africa and of African descent to British culture and identity. Correspondingly, my analysis of these two novels is concerned with the relationship between the construction of race, space and the movement of populations. More specifically, I argue that these novels illustrate that, historically, the biopolitical management of populations and the control of borders and space is crucial to the definition of the human being. At the same time, the novels demonstrate the potential of marginalised subjects to produce alternative spaces and create modes of affiliation which are outside the restrictive framework of national identity. Before describing my theoretical approach to the novels, it is important to underline the benefits of a comparative analysis of these two texts and to contextualise these novelists within the black British literary tradition. Firstly, the novelists had very different upbringings. Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in Zanzibar in 1948. When he was a teenager, Zanzibar gained full independence from Britain in 1963. Gurnah witnessed the 1964 revolution when the last Sultan of Zanzibar, Jamshid bin Abdullah was deposed and an oppressive Marxist regime came to power under Sheikh Abeid Karume. Educated under the Ryan 4 British colonial system, he decided to further his studies and came to Britain to attend university in 1968. This was a period of social upheaval and racial hostility against migrants in Britain epitomised by Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech. Gurnah completed his studies at the University of Kent in the 1980s. He had previously taught at Bayero University Kano in Nigeria and is currently based at the University of Kent.1 Gurnah is ambivalent about his relationship to Britain. His concept of home and belonging is mutable and incorporates various cultural and ethnic affiliations. While By the Sea focuses on domestic space, it is primarily concerned with public spaces such as the airport, state border zones, immigration control centres and detention centres for asylum seekers. Overall, Gurnah’s work challenges the hegemony of nationalist discourse and contains multiple influences, including aspects of his colonial education, his Muslim faith and Arabic literature in Africa. In contrast to Gurnah, Andrea Levy was born in Britain in 1956. Her father had travelled to Britain on the S.S. Windrush. Growing up in the sixties and seventies in North London, she was often the only black child in her class and her parents communicated very little to her about life in the West Indies because they were anxious for her to assimilate into life in Britain. Levy’s early literary influences included Toni Morrison, Audre Lourde and James Baldwin. She was also influenced by feminist writers in Britain such as Michelle Roberts and Zoe Fairbairn.2 She published her first novel in her late thirties and, although she had little knowledge of her Caribbean heritage growing up, her fiction is concerned with cultivating a social awareness of the history of slavery and imperialism in Britain. Levy’s writing is invested in the idea of Britain as home for many different population groups and, also, in the role of colonial slavery in shaping contemporary British society. She is the first female, British-born novelist to depict black women’s experience of Caribbean slavery. In particular, The Long Song focuses on the predominantly female space of the plantation house. Ryan 5 Although these writers have very different backgrounds, they also have many similarities and their novels share common themes. For instance, as writers of African descent, their novels describe the movement of people between Britain and Africa and, also, the complex history of cultural exchange that developed as a result of trade, colonialism and migration. Both also write about the history of slavery; Levy’s focus is on plantation slavery in the Caribbean and Gurnah refers to the history of slavery in Zanzibar and the Indian Ocean more broadly. They are both interested in the movement of populations under slavery and with making these diverse and, often, marginalised histories of movement visible through fiction. As a result, their writing is concerned with themes of displacement, racism and feelings of alienation in a hostile cultural environment. Finally, both authors are concerned with the relationship between borders, the production of space, the movement of populations and the construction of a normative concept of the human being. As I will demonstrate in the following chapters, both By the Sea and The Long Song examine the boundaries of the nation and how these boundaries are defined through the political exclusion of racialised or migrant bodies. They also illustrate how various social, cultural and political discourses have historically shaped Europe and European identity. However, the novels emphasise the porosity of the Europe border and the instability of European identity which has been altered through subterranean border crossings, ethnic and racial inter-mixing and migration. Gurnah is primarily concerned with geopolitics, the regulation of state borders and the marginalisation of certain populations at border zones. For him, marginalised and excluded populations are rendered inhuman by the sovereign powers of the state. By contrast, Levy is more explicitly concerned with literary space, specifically, the relationship between colonial literature and the construction of the black female body, questions of narrative authority and the politics of literary representation. For both authors, Ryan 6 however, the production and control of literary space contributes to the formation of concepts of the human and inhuman. Drawing on