Abstract
Rahbek reads Natasha Solomons’ Mr Rosenblum’s List: Or Friendly Guidance for the Aspiring Englishman (2010), Sathnam Sanghera’s Marriage Material (2014), and Caryl Phillips’ In the Falling Snow (2009), focusing on perceptions of a changing Britain and concomitant visions for the future of the nation. Drawing on socio-political reflections on visions for Britain’s multicultural, superdiverse, and globalised future by Bhikhu Parekh, Paul Gilroy, and David Olusoga, the chapter explores the ways in which the three novels engage in processes of reimagining the nation through an opening up of English ethnicity, a rethinking of the dialectic of similarity and difference and a loosening of the stronghold of race in the twenty-first-century Britain.
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Notes
- 1.
I am fully aware of the fact that I run together England/English and Britain/British in this chapter without heeding John McLeod’s warning against ‘the common slippage between Englishness and Britishness’ (2004: 3). I do this for purely pragmatic purposes and try to stay with the terms that the respective thinkers and writers prefer.
- 2.
I draw on Andrew Mason’s extension of Tariq Modood’s explanation of assimilation as a one-way process in which minority groups have to adjust to the majority and integration as a two-way process ‘which involves mutual adjustment and adaptation’ (2018: 25–26). Mason expands Modood’s understanding of integration also to include integration as the sharing of a national identity and the active participation of minority groups on equal terms with the majority in most domains of society (27). It is this all-embracing sense of integration that the vision of a reimagined Britain is enmeshed in.
- 3.
What I call the almost (or virtual) trope is a recurring idea in early multicultural literature. For example, Ignatius Sancho describes his experience of being an African in eighteenth-century England as a nagging feeling of being considered, ‘only a lodger, and hardly that’ (1782: 92). George Lamming’s evocation of the Caribbean man in post-war Britain as a sleeper on the sofa draws attention to the same awkward, guest-like status of being almost a part of the nation, but not quite. Caryl Phillips’ titular Cambridge represents himself as ‘a virtual Englishman’ (1991: 156) and, famously, Hanif Kureishi’s Karim Amir introduces himself as ‘an Englishman born and bred, almost’ in The Buddha of Suburbia (1990: 3). This almost/virtual trope of precarious belonging is also conceptualised in Caryl Phillips’ recurring refrain of being ‘of, and not of, this place’ in both The European Tribe (1987) and A New World Order (2001). Commenting on Phillips’ ‘of, and not of’ phrase, John McLeod insists that this state of affairs alerts us to the need for ‘a new rhetoric of belonging’ (2010a: 245, italics in original).
- 4.
I am thinking of hybridity here in light of Stuart Hall’s Homi K. Bhabha–inspired suggestion that hybridity ‘is really another term from the cultural logic of translation’, a process that is ‘never completed, but rests with its undecidability’ (2000: 226, italics in original).
- 5.
Sue Vice reads this moment in an interesting way: ‘Sadie’s mistaking the sound of a hunting-horn for that of the shofar […] demonstrates an extreme form of “Jewishing” English life. […] [T]he transformation needed for “becoming English” can only take place as part of a process that continues to work itself out, and not in the substitution of a ritual object for one associated with English class and privilege’ (2013: 109).
- 6.
Williams famously coined the phrase ‘structure of feeling’ to describe a ‘felt sense of the quality of life of any particular time and place’ and how this sense ‘combines into a way of thinking and living’ as he writes in The Long Revolution, cited by Tristram Hunt in the introduction to The Country and the City (2016: xv). Hunt quotes Stuart Hall’s explanation that ‘structure of feeling’ refers to ‘the way meanings and values were lived in real lives, in actual communities’ (xv).
- 7.
My decentralised ‘take’ on multicultural literature brings rural Britain into the discussion. In fact, it seems to me that some rural towns want to be part of the larger national narrative of multiculturalism, or at least such was the case before multiculturalism fell out of favour with politicians. An example of this interest in reinscribing your village and rural community into the larger national multicultural narrative is the short 2004 booklet Ethnic Minorities in Lyme Regis & West Dorset, Past & Present by Parker, Ford, and Draper, in which Jo Draper’s Preface states clearly that ‘[t]he history of ethnic minorities in Britain has largely been explored through studies of larger cities like London and Bristol, or of specific aspects like the slave trade itself’ (2004: 4). The intention with the booklet is to explore Lyme Regis as a slave trading port and how this status precipitated the settlement of various ethnic minority people, and to include the history of these peoples in the history of the area itself. This is a myth-busting exercise: Louisa Parker writes in the introduction that ‘Dorset is romantically seen as cut-off from the rest of the world, unspoilt and unchanging. Yet the reality is quite different. Lyme in particular was a very active port before it became a fashionable seaside resort in the eighteenth century, and inevitably people came and settled here from all over the world’ (7).
- 8.
In this connection, it is interesting to note that Dave Gunning concludes his analysis of White Teeth by quoting Anshuman Mondal’s reflections on a ‘more adequate’ multiculturalism for the twenty-first century. Gunning proposes that a ‘reconceptualization of ethnicity politics’ might be a way to move towards this goal (2012: 149). Perhaps Mr Rosenblum’s List can be read as a modest and relatively light-hearted example of how such reconceptualisations might be set in motion?
- 9.
However, after having finished writing this section I read in The Guardian (17 September 2018) that ‘4 in 10 think British culture is undermined by multiculturalism’ and ‘a larger minority of people in the UK’ believe that ‘migrants do not properly integrate’ (Booth 2018: np). Such findings surely make the vision of and concomitant reimaging of Britain as a vibrant multicultural nation a pipe dream.
- 10.
These phrases are culled from the speech: ‘The words I am about to use, verbatim as they appeared in the local press on 17 February, are not mine, but those of a Labour Member of Parliament who is a minister in the present government: “The Sikh communities’ campaign to maintain customs inappropriate in Britain is much to be regretted. Working in Britain, particularly in the public services, they should be prepared to accept the terms and conditions of their employment. To claim special communal rights (or should one say rites?) leads to a dangerous fragmentation within society. This communalism is a canker; whether practised by one colour or another it is to be strongly condemned.” All credit to John Stonehouse for having had the insight to perceive that, and the courage to say it.’ (Powell 2018): https://news.sky.com/story/fifty-years-since-enoch-powells-rivers-of-blood-speech-11338513.
- 11.
In the conversation between Kavita Bhanot and Balvinder Banga (2014) they discuss the question of authenticity and ‘dilution’ of cultural content in connection with Marriage Material and its audience. Bhanot says: ‘What disturbs me more is the intention, the ethics behind the literature of this new generation—the lack of compassion for those they have “left behind”, as they have become part of the establishment—and the extent of their ideological identification with this establishment as revealed in their writing’ (2014: 123). She goes on to suggest that since Sanghera is writing for a white, middle-class readership/publishing industry, to her Marriage Material lacks ‘complexity, depth and trueness—leaving me, as someone who is from a similar kind of world, quite unsatisfied’ (126). These are important critical considerations, especially for a white middle-class reader located in a Scandinavian university, someone from a very dissimilar kind of world than the one represented in the novel.
- 12.
The ongoing 2018 Windrush scandal precipitated by then Home secretary, now PM, Theresa May’s ‘hostile environment policy’ towards immigrants and migrants can be seen as a an emphatically negative answer to Baron’s question.
- 13.
Earl’s comments on the idea of England reminds me of David Dabydeen’s reflection on the ‘criss-cross of illusions’ in the introduction to his poetry collection Slave Song (1984): ‘ “England” is our Utopia, an ironic reversal, for [Walter] Raleigh was looking away from the “squalor” of his homeland to the imagined purity of ours whereas we are now reacting against our “sordid” environment and looking to “England” as Heaven. All is a criss-cross of illusions, a trading in skins and ideals’ (1987: 9).
- 14.
To be sure, Diana Evans’ recent novel, Ordinary People (2018), illustrates McLeod’s suggestion and thus lends credence to his argument about contemporary black writing of Britain’s emerging new vision of the nation.
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Rahbek, U. (2019). The Multicultural Novel, Part 1: Britain Reimagined. In: British Multicultural Literature and Superdiversity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22125-6_4
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