Abstract
Rahbek studies Zadie Smith’s ‘The Embassy of Cambodia’ (2013), Julian Barnes’ ‘East Wind’ (2008), and Olumide Popoola’s ‘Expect Me’ (2016), with brief references to Popoola’s ‘Counting Down’ (2016), Sefi Atta’s ‘A Temporary Position’ (2009), and Sue Gee’s ‘Glimpse’ (2016), with special focus on encounters in the stories and how encounters can lead to conflict or conversation. Taking a point of departure in what Kwame Anthony Appiah calls ‘conversation across difference’ and Bhikhu Parekh terms ‘intercultural dialogue’ and supplementing these ideas with reflections on kindness, friendship, love, hope, and despair, the chapter explores how intercultural dialogues can alleviate problems thrown up in superdiverse Britain through a reading of unexpected encounters and ongoing conversations in multicultural short stories.
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Notes
- 1.
According to Tariq Modood, ‘[d]ialogue necessarily implies openness and the possibility of mutual learning but not uncritical acceptance’ (2007: 65).
- 2.
There are obvious similarities between Freire’s ideas and Frantz Fanon’s ‘new humanism’—both rely on mental and attitudinal decolonising processes which completely dismantle the binary of oppressor/coloniser and oppressed/colonised, forcing the two erstwhile ‘opponents’ through the act of mutual recognition to see only fellow human beings, not white and black or superior and inferior.
- 3.
In contrast to the old African/black diaspora whose history is intimately linked to the experience and legacy of slavery.
- 4.
See the Economist, ‘Black Britons. The Next Generation’, 28 January, 2016.
- 5.
In After Identity, Jonathan Rutherford begins the chapter called ‘Ghosts’ with a visit to Bolton and ends it with an imaginary encounter between the unlikely figures of Rudyard Kipling and Frantz Fanon on the latter’s death bed in Washington in 1961. Sharing a feeling of loss and a history of European colonialism, albeit in very different ways, the two might have felt united in their difference. In fact, pondering their similarities, Kipling might have begun a conversation thus, Rutherford speculates: ‘In our difference what might we hold in common …?’ (2007: 56). It seems to me that the same speculation might have inspired Popoola in her staging of a conversational encounter between two unlikely characters.
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Rahbek, U. (2019). The Multicultural Short Story and Intercultural Conversation. In: British Multicultural Literature and Superdiversity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22125-6_6
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