Assimilation After Empire: Marina Lewycka, Paul Gilroy, and the Ethnic Bildungsroman in Contemporary Britain

Fielding, Heather

doi:10.1353/sdn.2011.0028

Cited by 27 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 8 publications

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“…Regardless of whether immigrants come from a country that was once colonized by Britain, the melancholic society rejects them and opts instead for discourse that represents Britain as what Heather Fielding describes as a "homogenous, pastoral nation." 13 In contrast to a melancholic society, however, Gilroy posits a convivial one that stresses the "processes of cohabitation and interaction" that characterize everyday encounters with diversity and cosmopolitanism in many contemporary urban centers (p. ix). The geographer Doreen Massey has coined the term "throwntogetherness" in this context, signifying the densely packed combination of human visions, worldviews, and trajectories in large cities.…”

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Between Forster and Gilroy: Race and (Re)connection in Zadie Smith's NW

Amelsvoort¹

2018

Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature

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This article interprets Zadie Smith's novel NW (2012) as an attempt to connect E. M. Forster's famous dictum "only connect" with Paul Gilroy's concept of "conviviality." NW's representation of two friends who are constituted by boundaries instilled by class, race and ethnicity, but who also contest those limits, points to the difficulties faced by many contemporary European minorities. In NW, the idea of race collaborates with that of ethnicity and class to form a strongly racialized logic through which the immigrant's upward mobility is subtly yet decisively affected. NW suggests that Gilroy's convivial society is only possible with Forsterian, interpersonal connections. Only after Leah and Natalie, the novel's central characters, rekindle their friendship, can they set in motion the novel's closing act of justice. Zadie Smith's fourth novel, NW (2012), closes with an act of justice. Leah Hanwell and Natalie Blake, who had been friends in high school in the London neighborhood of Willesden, suspect that a former classmate of theirs committed a murder and contact the police. First, they send in an anonymous tip but, finding the experience "anticlimactic," decide to make a call instead. 1 Leah and Natalie, who had become alienated during college and subsequently grew apart, connect again while calling the local police station. The narrator captures their act through a reference to their past familiarity and intimacy, which is consequently recreated in the present, with the image of "two heads pressed together over a handset" (p. 294). In this paper, I read this description as a sign of emotional, physical, and personal connection between the two women and take it as my guiding image. I argue that NW can be read as an attempt to relate E. M. Forster's famous dictum "only connect" from his novel Howards End (1910) with Paul Gilroy's ideas on "conviviality" as articulated primarily in After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (2004). 2 Reading together these two concepts-or perhaps intellectual ideals-suggests that creating and sustaining communities that emanate from interpersonal relations can resist the exclusionary and discriminatory practices of racism in contemporary, postcolonial Europe.

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confidence: 99%

Between Forster and Gilroy: Race and (Re)connection in Zadie Smith's NW

Amelsvoort¹

2018

Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature

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Marina Lewycka

Fielding¹

2020

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature

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Worldmaking

Clark¹,

Finlay²,

Kelly³

2017

FILLM Studies in Languages and Literatures

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In 1978, Nelson Goodman explored the relation of “worlds” to language and literature, formulating the term, “worldmaking” to suggest that many other worlds can as plausibly exist as the “world” we know right now. We cannot catch or know “the world” as such: all we can catch are the world versions - descriptions, views or workings of the world – that are expressed in symbolic systems (words, music, dancing, visual representations). Over the twenty-five years since then, creative works have played a crucial role in realigning, reshaping and renegotiating our understandings of how worlds can be made and preserved in the face of globalizing trends. The volume is divided into three sections, each engaging with worlds as malleable constructs. Central to all of the contributions is the question: how can we understand the relationships between natural, political, cultural, fictional, literary, linguistic and virtual worlds, and why does this matter?

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Assimilation After Empire: Marina Lewycka, Paul Gilroy, and the Ethnic Bildungsroman in Contemporary Britain

Cited by 27 publications

References 8 publications

Between Forster and Gilroy: Race and (Re)connection in Zadie Smith's NW

Between Forster and Gilroy: Race and (Re)connection in Zadie Smith's NW

Marina Lewycka

Worldmaking

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