Belongingness And Identity: Contested Space In Andrea Levy’s Small Island

Abstract

In Small Island (2004), Andrea Levy, an English writer born to Jamaican parents, looks back on the Caribbean migrants and their encountering the Britons in the Windrush era.  A voice of the crossing, Levy wishes to insert her blackness on the English literary scene. The historical transatlantic journey problematizing identity formation – singular and communal – contesting prevailing account of Britishness is fictionalized but in a realist narrative. The complex multilayered structure of Levy’s novel, with four discontinuous, criss-crossing personal narratives, offers distinct views along gender, class and colour lines. The proposed study, with an interdisciplinary approach, wants to analyze the varied socio-politico-cultural conditions in this text (and context) on the ground of immigrartion to England. Drawing significantly on postcolonial theory and diasporic dialectics, this proposed study attempts to explore the issues of alienation and assimilation, belongingness, contested space, and aims to show the securing of self-hood by the immigrants.