NEW POSTCOLONIAL BRITISH FICTION• White Teeth (2000): representation of a London where mixed

white and non-white immigrant parents are a given• London = mix of cultures, religions, languages and previous

nationalities• Birth of a new postcolonial British fiction: Hanif Kureishi’s

The Buddha of Suburbia (1990)• Recent example of the sub-genre: Monica Ali’s Brick Lane

(2003)• Early postcolonial literature: the writers could still remember

their countries of origin and remained ambivalent about their identity and allegiances

• New postcolonial literature: the writers only know a London characterized by multiculturalism and residual racism

THE EMPIRE WINDRUSH (1948)

A CRISIS OF NATIONAL IDENTITY• 1948: the Empire Windrush lands at Tilbury with almost

500 West Indian immigrants → crisis of British national identity

• Earlier waves of migration had brought differences of culture and language, but not of race and color

• Divestment of Britain’s colonies → racist backlash at immigrants arriving from former subject colonies

• 2001: over 4.6 million (7.9%) of the total population of 59.2 million was non-white, of which 53% was Asian; “mixed ethnicity”: 15% of the non-white population (1.2% of the total population); London: 53% of the UK’s non-white population (29% of the city’s inhabitants)

• Second generation immigrants, born and raised in England → new British citizens

MULTIETHNIC LONDON(S)Salman Rushdie Iis the most influential writer who deconstructs the

essentialist notions of national identity; he centers the London chapters of The Satanic Verses (1989) in Brickhall (actually Southall, with a predominantly Asian population), Kureishi uses West Kensington in The Buddha of Suburbia and Kilburn in The Black Album (1995), Monica Ali in Brick Lane focuses on Tower Hamlets (where a quarter of Britain’s Bangladeshis live). Smith chooses Willesden Green in White Teeth (2000)

Englishness = inevitably involving ethnic multiplicity → racism = symptom of the reluctance to accept the new hybrid nature of Britain’

V.S. Naipaul: first-generation immigrant who spent his life “Finding the Centre” (the title of two autobiographical narratives, 1984); vs. second-generation writers: the periphery becomes the center, and their liminal positions puts them both within and outside the many cultures they explore in their fiction

Monica Ali , “Real Lives”: (2003) “Growing up with an English mother and a Bengali father means never being an insider. Standing neither behind a closed door, nor in the thick of things, but rather in the shadow of the doorway, is a good place from which to observe”

Immigrant = modern Everyman, embodying the sense of being “immigrants” which resides in all of us

SOUTHALL

WEST KENSINGTON

KILBURN

TOWER HAMLETS

WILLESDEN GREEN

POSTCOLONIAL SUBJECTIVITYPostcolonial subjectivity (Gayatri Spivak and Homi

Bhabha): hybrid identities are negotiated through performance; migrant identity can only be represented in terms of difference

Stuart Hall:“what we call ‘the self’ is constituted out of and by difference, and remains contradictory”

Racist and ethnic stereotypes of colonial discourse attempt to deny the play of difference, but they cause difference to act as an unconscious repressed that returns to undermine the lingering colonial desire to represent itself through its distinction from the colonized other

A CONFUSED SENSE OF THE SELFFrantz Fanon: the black ex-colonial subject is alienated from

him- or herself by a Manichaean delirium, split between a black exterior and an assumed mask of white culture

Homi Bhabha: racism attempts to fetishize the subject by denying the difference which constitutes poststructuralist subjectivity

White Teeth: ambivalences and internal contradictions manifest themselves in the migrant families, but also in the white inheritors of the colonial legacy

Samad wants to be a true Muslim believer and to be Western by having an affair with a white Englishwoman; Millat is torn between subscribing to a militant branch of Islamic fundamentalism and living out the fantasies of Western heroism he has acquired from watching his favorite Hollywood movies, Goodfellas and Scarface

NO MORE LONELY LONDONERS• First Windrush generation → Sam Selvong, The Lonely

Londoners (1956): sense of bewilderment for not being accepted by London

• Second-generation immigrants: exteriorization of their inner conflicts → street riots and celebration of their contribution to the national culture

• White Teeth: younger immigrant characters assume they are as English as their white counterparts

• Office of National Statistics (January 2004): 87% of people who identified themselves as of mixed ethnic origin described their national identity as British

• On the other hand, impossibility to escape the shadow of the colonial past

BUT ALL LONDONERS ARE MARGINAL• White Teeth: all Londoners are marginal• At the beginning, Archie is as split in his inner sense of

identity, and is in a liminal space between life and death• Bhabha: “The borderline work of culture demands an

encounter with ‘newness’ that is not part of the continuum of past and present. It creates a sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation . . . it renews the past, re-figuring it as a contingent ‘in-between’ space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present”

• Archie and Clara meet in a passage phase: his wife has just left him, she has just left her mother: “had unhooked the old life, he was walking into unknown territory,” not the “New” World, but an intermediary space (Bhabha: “a return to the present . . . to touch the future on its hither side”)

IDENTITY AND DIFFÉRENCE• Stuart Hall:, identity “is constructed in or through différance and is

constantly destabilized by what it leaves out”• Différance = difference + deferral (something which is “other” not only

because it is “not I,” but above all because it is a part of the I which is removed, put at a distance, only to be inevitably encountered afterwards)

• Smith: difference is an effect of occupying any subjective position, not simply an effect of two different forms of identification.

• Clara : mixed origins (Jamaican maternal grandmother, white colonial grandfather) → identity = not a return to her roots, but a coming to terms with her cultural routes (Paul Gilroy)

• White teeth = metaphor for one’s own identity (teeth are used for identifying anonymous corpses) → Clara’s false teeth = deliberate confusion of closed forms of identity

• Chalfens: attempt to impose closure on their sense of British identity, denying the force of difference within their genealogy (but they are a third-generation immigrant family – Irish Catholic and German/Polish Jewish )

• Essentialization of ethnic identity → repression of the past containing the mixed ethnicity of everyone

AN HAPPY MULTICULTURAL LAND• But the younger generation cannot escape the ties of history by simply leaving the

family home. History emerges in the novel as an inescapable component of subjectivity constantly in process. Irie in particular longs to be rid of the long shadow of history. According to Fanon, the colonial subject (or that subject’s offspring) is always “overdetermined from without.” Near the end in her outburst on the bus Irie voices a longing that all her generation share – to live without having to hear about “everybody’s old historical shit all over the place.” But the narrator is skeptical about the myth that immigrants enter their new country, “Happy Multicultural Land,” “as blank people, free of any kind of baggage, . . . merging with the oneness of this greenandpleasantlibertarianlandofthefree”. The tautology alone (“Libertarian” and “free”) linguistically undercuts the clarity of the myth of a multicultural melting pot. A careful reader will be warned by the epigraph: “What is past is prologue,” uttered by Antonio in The Tempest (2.1.253). By the time Smith stages the reunion of Millat and Magid they are too conditioned by the past to reconcile their differences. Like the tortoise and Achilles in Zeno’s paradox, “the two brothers will race toward the future only to find they more and more eloquently express their past.” We are all fated to greater or lesser extent to repeat the past, which does not mean that the past is all-determining.

PAST-TENSE, FUTURE PERFECT

The refrain “past-tense, future-perfect” represents “the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect”: dream of all first-generation immigrants that their life will be transformed once they have entered the city where streets are paved in gold

Second-generation immigrants: condemned to reenact their parents’ original trauma, “the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another” → confused and confusing state of liminality, neither one nor the other (but also possibility of being both)

ROOT CANALSRoot Canals: metaphor of the connection between past (1857,

when Samad’s ancestor, Mangal Pange, unsuccessfully attempts to assassinate his English superior officer, but perhaps starts the first Indian mutiny; 1945, when Samad and Archie begin their friendship serving in the same tank crew) and present (London, 1974 to 1992)

Past = contested terrain, continually reinvented by the presentChalfens = myth of the freedom from the past (Irie: they are

“unblocked by history, free”); but no one is free of history.Stuart Hall: “cultural identities are . . . the unstable points of

identification or suture, which are made within the discourses of history and culture. Not an essence but a positioning”

Smiths, Iqbals and Chalfens = identity as the always varying positioning resulting from the negotiations between past and present

STRANGERS IN A STRANGE LAND• Younger generations: to-and-fro movement between the poles of assimilation

and cultural separatism• Irie: “There was England, a gigantic mirror, and there was Irie, without

reflection. A stranger in a strange land”; cf. Exodus, 2.22)• Millat “was neither one thing nor the other, this or that, Muslim or Christian,

Englishman or Bengali; he lived for the in-between” • In-between-ness = “crucial for the emergence of new historical subjects”

(Bhabha)• New generations: no memories of their country of origin → unlike Samad,

they do not regret that, having made the “devil’s pact” with the country of emigration, “suddenly you are unsuitable to return . . . you belong nowhere”

• Samad’s dystopia sounds “like paradise to her [Irie]. Sounded like freedom” • The in-between state, hybridity, does not have to be a choice between either

a clash or a syncretic merging of essentialist notions of cultures and races• All culture is constructed → “hybridity is about making meaning without the

repression of a pre-existing normativity” (Radhakrishnan) • Judith Butler: “Identifications are never fully and finally made; they are

incessantly reconstituted”