Literary intersections at the metropolitan centre: mapping new London narratives of migrant experience in contemporary fiction
D'Arcy, Rebecca
(2016)
Literary intersections at the metropolitan centre: mapping new London narratives of migrant experience in contemporary fiction.
PhD thesis, Dublin City University.
C ontem porary British m igrant literature writes back to the legacies o f im perialism
w hile also being firm ly grounded in the present cultural m om ent. A pproaching the
reading o f late tw entieth and early tw enty-first century British m igrant narratives from
a postcolonial perspective, this research project sets out to deliver a critical assessm ent
o f the m ajor them es and preoccupations o f fiction w ritten at the m etropolitan centre
that w rites back to im perialism and its legacies, w hile also exploring in detail questions
o f cultural identity in the present. The critical approach to the interrogation o f this
research question is theoretically grounded in the discipline o f postcolonial literary
criticism , w hile also taking cognisance o f im portant scholarship in the field o f cultural
studies. The central research question probes the diverse ways in w hich contem porary
authors depict im m igrant experience am ongst first and subsequent generation
m igrants in Britain. The project considers m yriad m om ents o f intersection and overlap
that occur across a diverse selection o f contem porary, L ondon-based narratives o f
m igrant experience. Authors o f Black, A sian and Irish ethnicities are read in dialectic
exchanges with one another on topics ranging from belonging and exclusion, to
identity, to m arginalisation and violence, and the nature o f traum a and m em ory. The
aim in reading novels from authors o f different ethnic backgrounds is to establish the
extent to w hich m igrant experience is sim ilar or differs am ong diverse ethnic groups.
In the project I assert that the im m igrant figure can be seen as a lonely voice in
literature, therefore a central aim o f the project is to pay attention to w hat this voice
has to say. I argue that an exploration o f the plight o f the im m igrant can inform us
about the problem s o f m odem society, including loneliness, isolation, and the
breakdow n o f com m unity and lack o f integration. Thus the project is at tim es
interdisciplinary in term s o f its theoretical fram ew ork. A lthough postcolonial theory
is the foundation o f the main thesis, the argum ents also draw on other areas o f
know ledge that inform postcolonial studies, such as psycho geography and m em ory
studies