Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story

Bettina Jansen

• Éditeur: Palgrave Macmillan
• Année: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319948607
• Sujet: Literatura
• Sous-sujet: Crítica literaria inglesa

Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story offers the first systematic study of black British short story writing, tracing its development from the 1950s to the present with a particular focus on contemporary short stories by Hanif Kureishi, Jackie Kay, Suhayl Saadi, Zadie Smith, and Hari Kunzru. By combining a postcolonial framework of analysis with Jean-Luc Nancy's deconstructive philosophy of community, the book charts key tendencies in black British short fiction and explores how black British writers use the short story form to combat deeply entrenched notions of community and experiment with non-essentialist alternatives across differences of ethnicity, culture, religion, and nationality.

© The Author(s) 2018

Bettina JansenNarratives of Community in the Black British Short Storyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94860-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Bettina Jansen¹

(1)

TU Dresden, Dresden, Germany

Bettina Jansen

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

The question of community, the question of how we want to live together, is one of the crucial questions of our times. Our contemporary era is shaped by struggles over race relations and concepts of community. Although migration, cross-cultural exchange, and transnational cooperation have become inherent aspects of our globalised lives, growing numbers of migrants as well as political refugees lead to periodic eruptions of racist and nationalist sentiments in many countries across the world. In Postcolonial Melancholia, Paul Gilroy warningly notes a global resurgence of “patriotism and ethnic-absolutism” (2005, 65). In Britain, too, the increase in Islamist terrorist attacks and the perceived threat of uncontrollable immigration have resulted in a racist backlash. The historic Brexit referendum was arguably won by an Islamophobic and anti-immigration leave campaign that revived the myth of a quintessentially white, monocultural, and homogeneous ‘British culture’. As a consequence, more than half of the British population feel that “ethnic minorities [threaten] their ‘culture’” (Hirsch 2017) and have become hostile towards both newly arriving refugees and British-born minorities.

What populist and nationalist evocations of an ‘original’ ethno-racial community conceal, however, is that human history is a history of migration and that the nation-states in their presently existing forms are fairly recent ‘inventions’ (see Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Anderson [1983] 1991). As early as in 1701, Daniel Defoe reminds his fellow countrymen that there is no “True-Born Englishman,” for “from a Mixture of all Kinds began,/That Het’rogeneous Thing, An Englishman” ([1701] 1974, 42–43). The right-wing notion of a hereditary and eternal English or British national community is a fabricated fiction, the myth of “community as essence” (Nancy [1986] 1991, xxxviii). Nevertheless, traditional, essence-based notions of community have real-life consequences for those excluded, who suffer from discrimination, violence, and, in extreme cases, systematic persecution.

In order to arrive at new, peaceful, and respectful paradigms of living together, it is necessary to deconstruct conventional conceptions of community that associate a sense of belonging with a shared territorial, ethno-racial, and/or spiritual essence. The thinking of community, the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy argues,

can no longer be a matter of figuring or modeling a communitarian essence in order to present it to ourselves and to celebrate it, but […] it is a matter rather of thinking community […] beyond communitarian models or remodelings. ([1986] 1991, 22)

What is at stake, then, is a redefinition of “[t]he very concepts of homogeneous national cultures […] or ‘organic’ ethnic communities” (Bhabha [1994] 2004, 6–8). We need to rethink existing social and cultural formations in order to replace the traditional ideology of homogeneity and ethno-racial as well as cultural purity with an acknowledgement of heterogeneity and a general openness towards others. Ultimately, the postcolonial critic Homi K. Bhabha rightly argues, refugees just like postcolonial migrants, diasporic peoples, and exiles are currently initiating “a radical revision in the concept of human community itself” (ibid., 8).

Literature plays an important role in this deconstruction of prevalent notions of community because literature, Nancy stresses, “[opens] community to itself” ([1986] 1991, 80). By inscribing community’s “infinite resistance to everything that would bring it to completion,” literature exposes alternative, non-essentialist models of community (ibid., 81). The black British writer and critic Caryl Phillips, too, points to the immense potential that literature holds for a renegotiation of community. In his essay “Colour Me English” (2011), he calls for an inclusionary and polycultural ¹ understanding of British and European community, urging us to “remind ourselves of the lesson that great fiction teaches us as we sink into character and plot and suspend our disbelief: for a moment, ‘they’ are ‘us’” (16). Literature encourages us to change perspectives and relate to the supposed other, discovering that they are not so different from ourselves but, in fact, “fellow human beings” (17). Phillips emphasises that “[a]s long as we have literature as a bulwark against intolerance, and as a force for change, then we have a chance” (16). Not only does fiction possess “the moral capacity […] to wrench us out of our ideological burrows and force us to engage with […] a world that is peopled with individuals we might otherwise never meet in our daily lives,” but “literature is [also] plurality in action” (ibid.). It presents various characters and gives voice to their thoughts and feelings without judging or even ranking them. Ultimately, Phillips argues, literary texts “[implore] us to act with a compassion born of familiarity towards our fellow human beings, be they Christian, Jew, Muslim, black, brown or white” (16–17).

The German literary theorist and cultural critic Ottmar Ette similarly argues that literary texts store a wealth of “knowledge for living together” (2010, 989). He contends that “[t]he time is right to understand literary scholarship as a science for living together” (991). Ette urges literary scholars to use their analytical access to literary storehouses of knowledge in order to partake actively in the contemporary discourse about “how radically different cultures might live together” (983). He states:

Although the literatures of the world have always been concerned with knowledge for living together, literary scholars have yet to mine this resource in any extensive and systematic fashion. Nor have they contributed any of this knowledge to recent public debates on the subject of life. But literary criticism and critical theory should be at the forefront of such discussions as we face the most important, and at the same time riskiest, challenge of the twenty-first century: the search for paradigms of coexistence that would suggest ways in which humans might live together in peace and with mutual respect for one another’s differences. (989)

Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story responds to Ette’s appeal in a number of ways. The book conducts an “extensive and systematic” study of the “paradigms of coexistence” that contemporary black British short fiction explores. Indeed, black British literature seems to be of particular relevance at the present moment. Produced by writers who are themselves in one way or another part of an earlier wave of mass immigration to Europe, namely the postwar migration from the Commonwealth to Britain, black British writing has reimagined community and suggested new models of social possibility since its beginnings in the 1950s. We will see that the specific form of the black British short story has proved particularly innovative in the experimentation with alternative kinds of communal belonging. By foregrounding black British short fiction’s profound knowledge for living together across cultural differences, this book wishes, as Ette demands, to contribute to the public discourse on respectful, just, and peaceful ways of communal living in Britain and beyond.

1 The Term ‘Black British Literature’

Any discussion of black British writing must start with a reflection on the term ‘black British literature’ because it has been disputed by writers and critics alike and has come to mean very different things. Authors like Salman Rushdie and Fred D’Aguiar early on warned that the term tends to marginalise the writers thus categorised “in […] relation to what might be called ‘white British literature’” (Ledent 2009, 16) and to restrict them in the choice of their subject matter (Rushdie 1987, 37–38; McLeod 2006, 95). More recent criticism points to the term’s overgeneralisation of the writers’ cultural diversity and its failure to “allow for full consideration of individual ethnic identities” (Upstone 2010, 2; see Arana 2009, xviii). Accordingly, several scholars differentiate between ‘black British’ literature penned by writers of African and Afro-Caribbean descent, and ‘British Asian’ or ‘Asian British’ literature written by authors of Asian or Indo-Caribbean descent (cf. Nasta 2002; Ellis 2007; Innes 2008; Upstone 2010).

In contrast to such a racial conception of ‘black’ as denoting a writer’s African heritage, I understand black in the British context as a political and cultural term. Following scholars like Procter (2003), Stein (2004), Arana (2007), and McLeod (2010), I use ‘black British literature’ as a highly inclusive and heterogeneous category that refers to texts by “writers with African, South Asian, Indo-Caribbean, and African-Caribbean backgrounds (backgrounds which could be further subdivided)” (Stein 2004, xiv). Such a wide understanding of black is indebted to the term’s original usage as a “unifying framework” (Hall [1989] 1996, 441) for Britain’s non-white population in their fight against racism (see Gilroy [1987] 1995, 230, 236). My conception of black, then, acknowledges, as Procter demands, black Br...