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Contemporary Women's Writing Advance Access published online on September 8, 2009
Contemporary Women's Writing, doi:10.1093/cww/vvp012
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Entangled Genealogies: White Femininity on the Threshold of Change in Andrea Levy's Small Island

Sarah Brophy

McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada brophys@mcmaster.ca

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.


   The Transformation of "Home" in British Postwar "Diaspora Space"
 
Isolation is the hallmark of male migrant narratives of 1950s London. Consider V. S. Naipaul's depiction of the city as a "conglomeration of private cells" (The Mimic Men 22); or George Lamming's image of embittered black nightclub owners who, believing they "have no people" in the metropolis, violently force new migrants who arrive in search of lodging out into the street's lonely "cul-de-sac" (The Emigrants 278–81).1 Andrea Levy's historical novel Small Island (2004) brings into view what her predecessors saw in rare glimpses, but ultimately judged next to impossible in postwar Britain: possibilities for intimacy, community, and a multiracial future. Writing as the daughter of Jamaican-born parents (her father landed at Tilbury, UK on the SS Empire Windrush in 1948), Levy premises Small Island's account of the postwar period on a concept of encounter gleaned from conversations with her mother:

Immigration is a very complex process – . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   Locating White Women's Cosmopolitanism in and around World War II
 

   Thresholds and Passageways
 

   The White Girl-Citizen at the British Empire Exhibition: Andrea Levy Meets Virginia Woolf
 

   Butchery: White Femininity's Self-Severing
 

   Conflicting Melancholias and Contested British Spaces
 

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