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‘The What Is It?’, representing the polar opposite of ‘the Model Man ’. 15 At the time of Canning’s parliamentary speech, the stage version of Frankenstein at Covent Garden was double-billed with a popular comedy by Richard Cumberland called The West Indian , whose eponymous hero, Belcour, has newly arrived in London. As a Creole, he found himself in an uncomfortable social position. Another of
Manville contends, radicalized the young Fanon who – albeit disillusioned by the Robert regime – still believed in the narrative that he was French.6 He initially explained away the racism which he encountered as a manifestation of the fascistic ideology of Vichy France. This racism undermined France’s republican tradition; it shattered the ‘France of ideals’ represented by the figure of the white Madonna in whose embrace the Martinican Negro child was held.7 In ‘West Indians and Africans’, Fanon describes the disillusionment – or better still the first ontological drama
At a time when monolingualist claims for the importance of ‘speaking English’ to the national order continue louder than ever, even as language diversity is increasingly part of contemporary British life, literature becomes a space to consider the terms of linguistic belonging. Bad English examines writers including Tom Leonard, James Kelman, Suhayl Saadi, Raman Mundair, Daljit Nagra, Xiaolu Guo, Leila Aboulela, Brian Chikwava, and Caroline Bergvall, who engage multilingually, experimentally, playfully, and ambivalently with English’s power. Considering their invented vernaculars and mixed idioms, their dramatised scenes of languaging – languages learned or lost, acts of translation, scenes of speaking, the exposure and racialised visibility of accent – it argues for a growing field of contemporary literature in Britain pre-eminently concerned with language’s power dynamics, its aesthetic potentialities, and its prosthetic strangeness. Drawing on insights from applied linguistics and translation studies as well as literary scholarship, Bad English explores contemporary arguments about language in Britain – in debates about citizenship or education, in the media or on Twitter, in Home Office policy and asylum legislation – as well as the ways they are taken up in literature. It uncovers both an antagonistic and a productive interplay between language politics and literary form, tracing writers’ articulation of linguistic alienation and ambivalence, as well as the productivity and making-new of radical language practices. Doing so, it refutes the view that language difference and language politics are somehow irrelevant to contemporary Britain and instead argues for their constitutive centrality to the work of novelists and poets whose inside/outside relationship to English in its institutionalised forms is the generative force of their writing.
susceptible to critical reshaping.17 Selvon’s polyphonic modernist metropolis, fabricated out of the linguistic resources of London on the one hand and Trinidad and the wider Caribbean on the other, is a city caught in the uneven throes of being creolised.18 In his confected literary vernacular, Selvon casts the provisional and fragile making of a society of West Indians in postwar London, mapped through a language-world shared between narrator, characters, and reader that offers a sense of commonality outside ‘the received, “standard” London’.19 For Selvon’s characters
be middle-class English or working-class English’ (103), yet admission to both categories is closed. Furthermore, John develops his understanding of Englishness, and his relationship to this category, in comparison to black Londoners, whom he observes. His commentary on race in London follows a passage in which he compares himself to a refugee. While he is ‘fleeing’ apartheid South Africa, he doubts that a ‘claim on his part to be a refugee’ will be accepted by the British Home Office (104). In the following paragraph, he describes West Indian
French Riviera, she writes: Marvellous Menton – for even momentarily taking my mind off London's ‘hot’ money houha, ‘dear’ money doldrums, ‘crisis’ Bank rate, Sir Cyril ‘Speculating’ Osborne (‘if 50,000 West Indians a year come to live in Britain, what of vice, health? But of course this is not colour prejudice’!), bingo, slump in steel, The Rhine Army – ‘Exercise Spearpoint’… (Jabavu 1962a : 101) In a list of
centre of Memmi’s critique is Fanon’s rejection of both French culture and negritude, and his espousal of revolutionary praxis in colonial Algeria and Africa. ‘In his short life,’ Memmi writes, ‘Frantz Fanon experienced at least three serious failures.’2 The first consists in his disavowal of his West Indian identity and in his identification with the colonizer’s cultural models, which were French and white. The second was the outcome of his disillusionment with these models; his encounter with racism in mainland France ultimately led him to renounce his Frenchness
is never explained, illuminated or resolved. In their north of England narratives, a spade is a spade, and race and empire are surface events rather than moments of profound revelation or epiphany. However, it is not that empire is merely outside, or even peripheral to, the insular landscapes of Peace and Barker’s self-consciously non-metropolitan, white working-class fictions. If the West Indian character of Bertha in Barker’s Union Street presents, in a text replete with doubles and mirrors, obvious parallels with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Peace’s is
When Todd Matshikiza passes fellow black Londoners in the street, he yearns to ‘throw fraternal blessing, greeting, good wishes’ at them, and perceives in their faces ‘them there blue lyrics’, singing out that ‘maybe we've got something in common’. He finds, though, that the black Londoner he greets ‘wasn’ looking for [his] common curry’ (Matshikiza 1961a : 41). In J.M. Coetzee's Youth ( 2002 ), in which he looks back on the same time period in which Matshikiza was writing, his focaliser, John, observes the ‘throngs of West Indians trudging
politeness and respect as stemming from his knowledge of our dependence ‘on the way others speak to us’ ( LH 156). Braithwaite is configured as sharing Kureishi's own sensitivity to ‘how we are made and constrained by language’ ( LH 156). Kureishi's interpretation is borne out in Braithwaite's novel, written in the context of fears of miscegenation. Ricky, the narrator, reflects on how a mixed-race child would always be referred to as ‘a coloured boy with a white mother, a West Indian boy with an English mother. Always the same