British Multicultural Literature and Superdiversity

Ulla Rahbek

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030221249
• eBook ISBN: 9783030221256
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explores contemporary British multicultural multi-genre literature. Considering socio-political and philosophical ideas about British multiculturalism, superdiversity and conviviality, Ulla Rahbek studies a broad range of texts by writers from across the majority-minority divide. The text focuses on figurative registers and metaphorical richness in multicultural poetry and investigates the interlocked issue of recognition, representation and identity in memoirs. Rahbek analyses how twenty-first-century British multicultural novels both envision and reimagine an inclusive nation and thematise the detrimental effects of individual exclusion on characters' pursuits of the good life. She observes the ways that short stories pivot on ambivalent encounters and intercultural dialogue, and she reflects on the public good of multicultural literature.

© The Author(s) 2019

Ulla RahbekBritish Multicultural Literature and Superdiversityhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22125-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Old and New Diversity

Ulla Rahbek¹

(1)

University of Copenhagen, København S, Denmark

Ulla Rahbek

End Abstract

Books about contemporary British multicultural literature tend to open with a multicultural moment in a literary text or a multicultural spectacle in the ‘the real world’. Thus, one could begin with the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948, if one was historically inclined, with the unveiling of Yinka Shonibare’s ‘Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle’ on the fourth plinth in London’s Trafalgar Sq. on 24 May 2010, if one was artistically inclined, or with the multicultural performance of the opening of the London Olympics in July 2012, if one was more generally culturally inclined.¹ If one was especially keen on literary representations of multiculture, as I am, one could also set the stage with an unexpected multicultural moment in a recent literary text, such as Sarah Perry’s hugely successful historical novel, The Essex Serpent (2016). In this story some of the characters go slumming in 1890s Bethnal Green. Martha, the protagonist’s companion, is originally from these parts, and she is familiar with the scene that unfolds before them, which is focalised through her:

Polish labourers had come to seek work, discovering that if Dick Wittington had been misled about London’s pavements, the weather was at least more temperate in winter and the docks never slept. They were cheerful and noisy; they leaned in doorways in pairs with their caps tipped, passing a Polish newspaper back and forth; they smoked black-papered cigarettes that gave off a fragrant pall. A Jewish family went volubly by on their way to catch a bus, and the girls wore red shoes; a moment later an Indian woman passed on the other side and in each ear was a bit of gold. (Perry 2017: 281–2)

Such quotidian and seemingly unexceptional multicultural coexistence is familiar to readers of contemporary literature set in the contemporary period. Martha’s observing eye notices details, noise, colour, and movement and provides the reader with a quick snapshot that welds the representation of the diversity of the 1890s to the twenty-first century—clearly the past is not such a foreign country after all. Indeed, one could also consider how George, Christopher Isherwood’s US-based protagonist of his 1964 novel, A Single Man, reminisces about the last time he visited Britain:

I think it’s probably the most extraordinary country in the world—because it’s such a marvellous mixup. […] One morning we were on this little branch-like train, and we stopped at a village which was right out of a Tennyson poem. […] On the platform were two porters dressed just the same way porters have been dressed since the nineteenth century. Only they were Negroes from Trinidad. And the ticket collector at the gate was Chinese. I nearly died of joy. I mean, it was the one touch that had been lacking, all these years. It finally made the whole place perfect. (Isherwood 2001: 131–2)

To Geo, turning the view from the train window into a display of a layered and surprising ‘mixup’, the changing-same that is Britain’s multiculturalism is profoundly satisfying—at least from the vantage point of a Brit based in the USA.

Such observations are abundant in British literature, especially in British multicultural literature, and they attest to the diversity that is organic to the development of multiculturalism Britain and that is transforming into what is often now termed the diversification of diversity in contemporary superdiverse Britain. British Multicultural Literature and Superdiversity explores the increasingly complex diversification of diversity that is apparent in everyday conviviality and conflict in contemporary British multicultural literature.² Loosely defining ‘contemporary British multicultural literature’ as literature that engages in and thematises the socio-political realities of lived multiculture and superdiversity especially in twenty-first-century Britain regardless of author biography and ethnic-religious allegiances, the book takes a combined socio-political and philosophical ideas approach to the literary texts it explores. The texts under consideration are published in the first half of the twenty-first century, between 2007 and 2017, and they mostly focus on the contemporary period. While some of the narratives situate their characters in a framework that relies on exploration of the past, especially the post-war period in Britain and its lasting effects on lives in the textual present, the focus throughout is predominantly on the contemporary period. I have opted for what might be called a decentralised and multigeneric approach. Thus, the rationale behind the choice of texts is that I want to include a broad spectrum of works that explore British multiculture in places other than London and through different literary forms than the novel, which tends to be privileged in explorations of multicultural literature. To be sure, I explore London as setting and study novels, but I also engage in detail in different genres and a host of settings outside of the metropolis. Furthermore, I want to study narratives that speak from many different communities and in many different voices, so as to emphasise the diversity of this literature and the multiple ways it engages in and, by extension, helps create contemporary superdiverse Britain. Exploring genres such as poetry, short stories, memoirs, and novels and focusing on Jewish, Chinese-British, ‘white’ writers as well as black-British and Asian-British authors the book broadens the scope of the common understanding of multicultural British literature. British Multicultural Literature and Superdiversity participates in the call to rethink contemporary diversity, identity politics, and multiculturalism as proposed by, to name a few scholars and commentators, Bhikhu Parekh, Kenan Malik, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Stuart Hall, and Amartya Sen. Engaging in the ongoing and unfinished conversation on multiculturalism—from an explicitly literary perspective—the book revolves around the textual representations of ongoing dialogues about, above all, culture and identity, the individual and the community and the complex social and personal experiences of British superdiversity.

This introductory chapter develops the socio-political and philosophical conceptualisations and theories of multiculturalism—what I like to think of as old diversity—and superdiversity—or what is often labelled new diversity—that inform the literary analyses in the subsequent chapters. It discusses how new diversity is layered upon old diversity, creating and shaping the complex social environments of what Steven Vertovec (2007) terms a general and widespread diversification of diversity and Lasse Thomassen calls ‘the already sedimented representational space of British multiculturalism’ (2017: 4). This introductory and scene-setting terminological and theoretical discussion pivots especially on the role of culture in human lives and how culture affects understandings of identity. The central ideas subsumed under the umbrella of a combined multicultural and superdiverse perspective on life—or more precisely, on lives in literature—will be developed in the chapters of this book. What I hope to demonstrate is that such a conceptual and theoretical platform is a productive springboard from which to approach contemporary literature—especially if multiculturalism and superdiversity are understood as approaches to human and textual lives. In what follows, I want to suture Bhikhu Parekh’s version of British multiculturalism, envisioned as old diversity, on Steven Vertovec’s superdiversity, envisioned as new diversity. However, since both old and new diversity hinge on the complexity of living with difference I also want to weld the idea of conviviality to this combined lens in order to better conceptualise and make sense of the kinds of everyday British multicultural living thematised in the literary contributions explored in the subsequent chapters. It is important to bear in mind throughout that multiculturalism and superdiversity do not cancel each other out but rather supplement each other as a valuable and illuminating perspective on contemporary British literature. I will first unpack the understanding of multiculturalism that the book relies on. Then I will discuss superdiversity and conviviality and how the new diversity of superdiversity is layered upon the old diversity of multiculturalism. This will be the general framework for the rest of the book.

I want to take a point of departure in Paul Kelly’s observation that ‘multiculturalism is not a single school of thought but, rather, a loose confederation of thinkers’ (2002: 62) and combine this insight with Stuart Hall’s insistence that ‘[j]ust as there are different multicultural societies so there are very different “multiculturalisms”’ (2000: 210). Hall goes on to list different multiculturalisms, such as conservative, liberal, pluralist, commercial, corporate, and critical multiculturalism (210). In an attempt to delimit this entangled and discursively messy field I also draw on Michael Murphy’s notion of contextual multiculturalism in my explicit focus on British multiculturalism. Contextual multiculturalism is, according to Murphy, a multiculturalism that is alert to ‘the facts on the ground’ (2012: 129) and that keeps ‘theories grounded in reality’ (146). The reluctant multiculturalism of Scandinavia, where I am writing from, is indeed very different from the British multiculturalism that I am writing about. British multiculturalism is affected by the history and legacy of Empire, indexes a complicated and intertwined relationship between Britain and its former colonies, and is focused on not...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Old and New Diversity
• 2. Multicultural Poetry: On Filigrees, Grafting, and Mirrors
• 3. The Multicultural Memoir: A Politics of Recognition for the Individual
• 4. The Multicultural Novel, Part 1: Britain Reimagined
• 5. The Multicultural Novel, Part 2: Bordered Britain
• 6. The Multicultural Short Story and Intercultural Conversation
• 7. Conclusion: The Public Good of (British) Multicultural Literature
• Back Matter