Doing Family in Second-Generation British Migration Literature

Corinna Assmann

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783110603873
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Due to the large-scale global transformations of the 20th century, migration literature has become a vibrant genre over the last decades. In these novels, issues of transcultural identity and belonging naturally feature prominently. This study takes a closer look at the ways in which the idea of family informs processes of identity construction. It explores changing roles and meanings of the diasporic family as well as intergenerational family relations in a migration setting in order to identify the specific challenges, problems, and possibilities that arise in this context. This book builds on insights from different fields of family research (e.g. sociology, psychology, communication studies, memory studies) to provide a conceptual framework for the investigation of synchronic and diachronic family constellations and connections. The approach developed in this study not only sheds new light on contemporary British migration literature but can also prove fruitful for analyses of families in literature more generally. By highlighting the relevance and multifaceted nature of doing family, this study also offers new perspectives for transcultural memory studies.

1Introduction: Family Matters in Contemporary British Migration Literature

Stuart Hall was 18 years old when he immigrated to the UK, an age that symbolically marks the entry into adulthood and the corresponding dissociation from the family of origin. As he points out in his 1986 essay “Minimal Selves”, family, however, remains a crucial framework for the constitution of the self – even if spatially removed:

It wasn’t a joke when I said that I migrated in order to get away from my family. I did. The problem, one discovers, is that since one’s family is always already ‘in here,’ there is no way in which you can actually leave them. […] I wish they were still around, so that I didn’t have to carry them around, locked up somewhere in my head, from which there is no migration. So from the first, in relation to them, and then to all the other symbolic ‘others,’ I certainly was always aware of the self as only constituted in that kind of absent-present contestation with something else, with some other ‘real me,’ which is and isn’t there. (Hall 1996, 116)

In this impressive self-portrait Hall expounds self-formation as a process that is never performed independently of others but is intrinsically intersubjective and always relational, and as such, continuously changing and unstable. The migration experience described by Hall shows how persistently the family continues to shape identity-building processes; even when it is no longer part of his immediate environment, it haunts his existence as ‘symbolic other’. The context of migration creates a specific frame for the “absent-present contestation” that Hall ascribes to the family and which is closely linked to questions of cultural identity, home and belonging. The continuing presence of the absent family establishes a link between past and present, the old and the new. This connection connotes constancy and coherence in the face of the rupture of migration, which is often accompanied by a strong sense of change and loss. At the same time, there is a ‘haunting’ quality to this idea of family: it cannot be evaded or escaped but demands to be dealt with in some way. In this light, family may be experienced as at odds with a person’s self-image, or as a constrictive determinant regarding adaptation processes in the new surrounding.

Hall’s observation of the internalisation of the family as a ‘symbolic other’ is striking in its compact precision regarding the complex nature of identity, family, and migration. He develops this even further through his metaphoric description, where he touches on the intertwinement of the cognitive ‘symbolic other’ “in [his] head” and the corporeal dimension of self and other in the family context. The family is “carr[ied] around”, one cannot “leave it”, it is “in here” – incorporated. This description testifies to the strong affective bonds within the family. Taken literally, however, it can also be read to refer to the bodily connection one bears to one’s family through genetic descent. Family is thus not only a primary point of reference and framework for the social construction of identity, it is also the basis for the genetic code. What makes family such an interesting analytical framework for the construction of identity is the interplay and tension between social and biological factors of identity, between heredity on the one hand – the genetic transmission of physical or mental traits – and (cultural) heritage – traditions, values, and norms that are passed on from generation to generation – on the other. Any engagement with family-related negotiations of the self will consequently also deal with the intersections of constructionist and essentialist concepts of identity.

Considering the fact that the family plays such a major role in identity construction, it is surprising that this specific interrelation has not gained more attention in literary studies. The process of identity formation begins and evolves in the family as an ‘interactively lived community’ (cf. Brinker-von der Heyde 2004, 8). Roles, relationships, behavioural patterns, and social structures as they are practised within the family permeate all other social interactions and areas of life. This study brings together the two topics of family and migration, with the aim of providing a systematic exploration of the role of the family under the pressure of migration as reflected in migration literature.1

1.1Family and Migration

Migration has a strong impact on family relations and identity construction. What had been experienced as self-evident and taken for granted in the home country is now rendered strange, complex, and fraught with contradictions. The disintegration of established alliances and networks necessitates a search for new points of reference. The intercultural experience produces a radical proliferation of social and cultural frameworks of identity that transforms and overturns accepted family relations and roles. This often posits a challenge to families, which have to come to terms with the re-evaluation of family values, roles, and traditions from the first generation to the next. This ‘disruptive’ experience turns the world of the family upside down, and is the reason for migration theory to start counting generations from this new ‘point of origin’. The distinction between first, second, or third generation is used broadly to characterise different points of view and experiences in the shared history of migration that change with the socio-historical context, resulting in different national affiliations, modes of belonging, and cultural identities from one generation to the next.2 For members of the second generation, those born in Britain or immigrated at a childhood age, the process of identity construction in multicultural societies is often particularly intricate and tension-laden. Not surprisingly, many texts of migration literature deal with questions of transcultural identities and belonging precisely from this second-generation perspective (cf. Korte 1999).

The different ‘generations’ of migration literature written in the twentieth century can also be read in light of the political debate and the discourse on multiculturalism in Britain, as many outlines of British Black and Asian writing demonstrate.3 While British Black and Asian authors from the first generation largely dealt with problems of social belonging and racism in the difficult context of arrival and accommodation in new and often hostile surroundings,4 writers of the second generation have programmatically called for and induced a redefinition of “Englishness” as an open concept of national and cultural identity that is more true to the changed situation in the UK.5 The 1980s and 90s are generally seen as a watershed period in Black British cultural politics and aesthetics that is decidedly influenced and advanced by a “new generation”, or a “new breed” of writers (Sesay 2004, 107, 100). Chris Weedon (2016, 40) defines the period between 1980–2010 as one of “an increase and diversification in writing by black and Asian writers in the UK, augmented thematically and aesthetically by work from generations born and/or educated in Britain and their new configurations of questions of difference and identity”. According to John McLeod’s (2010, 46) cogent outline of a genealogy of black writing in Britain,6 the second generation is characterised by its particularly rich creative output and its key role in the evolvement of Black British politics and aesthetics in the 1980s and the following final decades of the twentieth century. This view is supported by Daniela Berghahn (2013, 7) with regard to cinema when she describes the second generation of European filmmakers with migrant backgrounds as being responsible for “the development of a vibrant diasporic film culture”. In his widely influential study on the Black British bildungsroman, Mark Stein (2004, 171) also emphasises this “transformative potential” in much second-generation writing that aims at “describing and inciting cultural changes”, or, in other words, at “‘re-writing’ Britain” (Stein 2002, 34–35). Such a transformation, however, is no simple and easy process, as Hanif Kureishi’s much-quoted beginning to his debut novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1999 [1990], 3) demonstrates: “I am an Englishman born and bred, almost.” This instance of conditional ‘self-ascription’ hints at the problematic negotiation of a second-generation migrant identity through conflicting social demands, expectations, self-images, and the perception that others have of them. It is in the nature of things – of being born and bred, so to speak – that the family becomes a prominent and pressing issue in second-generation writing. As the selection of books to be examined in this book will show, second-generation writers increasingly bring into focus family constellations and connections, and thus – via the diachronic (and diasporic) perspective of family history – extend the temporal and spatial framework in which questions of memory, identity, and belonging are explored to include long-term historical entanglements and (post-)colonial involvements.7 In following this shift in focus to family-related issues, and therefore to more ‘local affairs’, I take my cue from McLeod’s (2010, 46–47) important observation that contemporary British Black writing is not always and not solely concerned with “the refashioning of ‘British identities’” at a personal psychological as well as national level.

From here, I will proceed to analyse migration literature at the turn of the twentieth century in light of the ways in which family informs identity construction.8 Focusing on second-generation writers, I want to look into the changing roles and meanings of the family as well as intergenerational family relations in a migration setting. I will aim to highlight the specific challenges, problems, and possibilities that arise in the process of identity construction as they are conveyed through the prism of the family – a dimension of experience that has, as yet, been largely neglected in the study of migration literature. The family is not only “the crucible of society” (Vangelisti 2003, ix), it is also, generally speaking, the context in which the groundwork for a person’s identity is laid. The family as reference point for the formation of the self sheds light on key aspects of identity construction, bringing together and creating a fruitful tension between social constructionist and biological determinist concepts of identity.9 Zadie Smith’s seminal debut novel White Teeth, for example, plays with the contradictions and friction resulting from these two models of heteronomous determination vs. autonomous self-definition. This not only involves the issue of genetic inheritance, when the body takes on significance as a carrier of family history, and family memory emerges as inscribed into the genetic code as an inalienable part of the self.10 The aspect of the body also opens up important concerns particularly with regard to Black and Asian British literature, in which racism, discrimination, and the attempt to cast off imposed stereotypes are common motifs. Against the background of this dimension of ‘family resemblances’, the body cannot be exclusively considered as a medium of performative constructions of identity, it now also becomes a site of racialisation, an important carrier of identity that involves a great potential for conflict in negotiating identity and ethnic and cultural belonging. As the locus of genetic transmission, the family plays a pivotal role in this negotiation and is intractably linked to the conflict.

A frequently used and popular plotline in migration fiction is based on the intergenerational conflict in the family that arises from issues of cultural belonging and affiliation, in which characters of the second generation are presented as having to position themselves between the values and views of their parents on the one hand, and those of the host society and their social generation on the other.11 Mark Stein (2004, 29) emphasises the importance and frequency of this trope in second-generation migration literature, where it is usually cast as a “blending of what could vaguely be referred to as generational and cultural conflicts” (see also Stein 2002, 34). While such social dynamics set in motion by the family members’ dissimilar processes of acculturation take place on the synchronic axis of the family, the diachronic axis introduces the perspective of family history – a perspective that has not received due attention in literary studies thus far.12 If we take serious Chris Weedon’s (2016, 46; emphasis in the original) assertion that a primary aspect of second generation writing is that it “draws on family and community memories of migration”, then a closer focus on the familial context and framework of memory and the processes of transmission it involves seems warranted. In many novels, the characters are not just members of a modern ‘nuclear’ family; they also evolve as part of a transgenerational network of relations. The aim of this study is to explore such historical extensions of the individual self-narrative in interconnection with the other factors mentioned above, namely the body and social interaction. It will, moreover, be interesting to see how “[w]e can gauge this shift in concerns by attending to changes in literary form” (McLeod 2010, 47), namely, how the interplay between the synchronic and diachronic dimension of the family also influences the formal level of the written text. We can assume that the role of the family at the story level has implications at the discourse level and affects the modes of representation. This may concern genre-related features of the novels, with regard to genres such as the bildungsroman or family novel, narrative mode, or other narratological aspects such as the semanticisation of time and space.

1.2The Family as a (New?) Field for Literary Studies: Aims and Methodology

Although the family is one of the biggest and most common topics in literature, it is still largely under-theorised in literary studies.13 The topic does, however, neatly dovetail with a number of research areas that have recently gained ground in literary studies, and which serve as a fruitful starting point for a more detailed investigation into (migrant) families in literature. Three concepts will be of particular importance for this thesis in order to create a theoretical frame of reference: the relational self, generations and genealogies, and the nexus of memory and narrative. Each of these research areas have drawn a great deal of attention from the field of narratology recently, and consequently offer a broad basis of theoretical conceptualisation around questions of identity construction and, as will be shown, family matters.

As this study aims to put the individual into the context of the family, it seems natural to turn to the concept of the relational self as developed by John Paul Eakin, which emphasises the importance of personal relationships and the positioning of the individual within a larger network of relations for the construction of identity (cf. Eakin 1999, 43ff.). The family as “primary social unit” (Visser 2005, 5) naturally plays a crucial role in this context. Consciousness of the self does not develop in isolation, independent of others, because self-formation has at its very core an intersubjective dimension in that we depend on others to recognise and affirm how we see ourselves (cf. Eakin 1999, 52). Beyond this very basic aspect of intersubjectivity, identity is always constructed in relation to others, whether through aspects of sameness, affiliation, imitation, or through differentiatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• 1 Introduction: Family Matters in Contemporary British Migration Literature
• 2 Family Practices and Cultures of Relatedness
• 3 Uncovering Family History: The Intergenerational Construction of Identity through Family Memory
• 4 Family Secrets and Religious Conflict in the Muslim Diaspora
• 5 Family Memoirs: Relational Life Writing
• 6 Four Topoi of ‘Doing Family’: Food, Home, Photography, and the Body
• Works Cited
• Index