Beyond Black British? The Novels of David Dabydeen, Monica Ali, Zadie Smith, and Hanif Kureishi

270 Pages·2014·2.44 MB·English

by  Amira Richler

Beyond Black British? The Novels of David Dabydeen, Monica Ali, Zadie Smith, and
Hanif Kureishi

by

Amira Richler

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
Doctor of Philosophy

Supervised by Professor Bette London
Department of English
Arts, Sciences and Engineering

University of Rochester
Rochester, New York

2014
ii
Biographical Sketch

The author was born in Montreal, Quebec on September 1, 1978. She attended
McGill University from 1998 to 2003 and earned a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in
English and Cultural Studies. In 2003, she began her Master of Arts degree in English at
McMaster University, where she was funded by an Ontario Graduate Scholarship. She
graduated from McMaster University in the summer of 2004. In the fall of 2004, Amira
began graduate studies in English at the University of Rochester. From 2004 to 2005, she
was supported by a University of Rochester Tuition Fellowship as well as a University of
Rochester Graduate Fellowship. She began teaching for the College Writing Program in
2005 and was awarded a Writing Associate across the Disciplines Fellowship for the
academic year of 2008-2009. Under the direction of Professor Bette London, she pursued
her research in English and received a Master of Arts degree from the University of
Rochester in 2008.
iii
Acknowledgements

There are so many people who have supported me through this journey, without
whom I would not have been able to complete this project. It would be impossible to
mention everyone who has touched my life during this time, but there are a few
individuals who deserve special mention.
First, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my dissertation advisor,
Bette London. Throughout the entire writing process, Bette provided me with extremely
detailed and constructive feedback that ultimately made my writing more coherent and
pushed it to the next level. I would also like to thank my other committee members,
Supritha Rajan and Cilas Kemedjio, for helping me reach this goal. Supritha’s
background in nineteenth century British literature and feedback on my chapters helped
solidify the direction of my project as a whole. Cilas’ class “Madness and Postcolonial
Literature” impacted my desire to examine the intersection between black British
literature and the postcolonial project.
Many thanks to my dissertation group members, Jennifer Thompson Stone,
Valerie Blythe Johnson, and Leila Kate Norako, who gave me invaluable feedback as I
drafted sections of the dissertation. They provided a sense of community in what can be a
very isolating process. Likewise, I am indebted to my friend and mentor, Alison Miller,
whose encouragement and insight into the trials and tribulations of writing a dissertation
made it possible for me to complete this manuscript.
Of course, no acknowledgments page could be complete without thanking my
parents, Lorne and Leonie Richler, and my brother, David Richler, who have always
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fostered my quest for knowledge and have been there for me every step of the way.
Finally, my husband, Peter Sherman, has been my rock and the voice of reason. His
unconditional love and support have been truly instrumental, and I cannot imagine having
gone through this period without him.
v
Abstract

My dissertation examines a series of novels written over the last twenty years by
writers who are customarily identified as second-generation black British, including
David Dabydeen’s The Intended (1991), Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), Zadie Smith’s
On Beauty (2005), and Hanif Kureishi’s The Body (2002). I ask the following critical
questions: How useful is the category of black British writing and the label black British
to Dabydeen, Kureishi, Ali, and Smith? How do these writers respond to the
institutionalization of black British studies through their fiction?
I argue that Dabydeen, Ali, Smith, and Kureishi convey varying degrees of
ambivalence towards the broad category of black British literature and the term black
British, and in doing so, they problematize scholars’ attempts to position them and their
novels within these categories. In particular, these four authors challenge the category of
black British writing, the term black British, and the expectation that they will adopt the
task of speaking for other black and Asian Britons by ‘writing back’ to a multiplicity of
sources. In chapter one, I claim that although Dabydeen questions the essentialist and
heterosexist notion of black British identity prevalent during the 1970s by rewriting
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), he also stresses the usefulness of the label
and the category of writing. In chapter two, I affirm that Ali interrogates first-generation
black British male writers’ portrayal of the flâneur by emphasizing the protagonist’s
identity as a British Asian flâneuse and translator of London. At the same time, Ali
engages with some of the typical concerns of black British literature by redefining the
London represented in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). Chapter three assesses
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how Smith moves past E.M. Forster’s privileging of the notion of ‘place,’ as well as the
central role that place plays in black British fiction, by distancing On Beauty from his
novel Howards End (1910) and her first novel White Teeth (2000). Finally, chapter four
investigates how Kureishi repudiates the fundamental premises of black British literature
by ‘writing back’ to his own canon of fiction and by paying homage to Mary Shelley and
Oscar Wilde.
vii
Contributors and Funding Sources

This work was supervised by a dissertation committee consisting of Professors
Bette London (advisor), Supritha Rajan of the Department of English, and Cilas
Kemedjio of the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures. The student completed
all work for the dissertation independently. Financial support for graduate study came
from a University of Rochester Graduate Fellowship, a University of Rochester Tuition
Fellowship, a Writing Associate across the Disciplines Fellowship, and earnings from
teaching in the College Writing Program.
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Table of Contents
Biographical Sketch ii

Acknowledgements iii

Abstract v

Contributors and Funding Sources vii

Table of Contents viii

Introduction 1

Chapter One Queering Heart of Darkness: David Dabydeen’s The Intended and the
Problem of Immigrant Grief 22

I.
 Introduction
  22

II.

 From
 Boyhood
 to
 Manhood:
 Lost
 Objects
 and
 The
 Challenge
 of
 Interpreting

Conrad
  30

III.
 “The
 Condition
 of
 Blackness”:
 Joseph
 and
 the
 Grievable
 Life
  63

IV.
 Conclusion
  78

Chapter Two Lost and Found: Translation as Textual, Cultural, and Postcolonial
Phenomenon in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane 79

I.
 Introduction
  79

II.
 Critiquing
 the
 Male
 Translator:
 Patriarchal
 Privilege
 and
 the
 Problem
 of

Canonical
 Authority
  83

III.
 Losing
 and
 Finding
 Oneself
 in
 Translation:
 The
 Immigrant’s
 Journey
 in
 London

  99

IV.
 Monica
 Ali
 as
 Translator:
 Deciphering
 Mrs
 Dalloway
  120

V.
 Conclusion
  133

Chapter Three Unsettling Englishness: Zadie Smith’s Ambivalent Inheritance of
E.M. Forster 135

I.
 Introduction
  135

II.
 Demythologizing
 Pastoral
 Englishness
  142

III.
 On
 Beauty’s
 Deficient
 Englishmen
  151

IV.
 The
 Death
 of
 Traditional
 English
 Femininity
  170

V.
 Conclusion
  192

Chapter Four Beyond Black British: Hanif Kureishi’s The Body 193

I.
 Introduction
  193

II.
 Reinventing
 the
 Self:
 The
 Quest
 for
 Lost
 Youth
  199

III.
 Frankenstein,
 The
 Picture
 of
 Dorian
 Gray,
 and
 the
 Crisis
 of
 Masculinity
  222

IV.
 Conclusion
  237

Works Cited 239
1
Introduction

Many important critical studies on the topic of black British literature, such as
Writing Black Britain (by James Procter) and Black British Culture and Society (by
Kwesi Owusu), came out in the year 2000 alone (Low and Wynne-Davies 2). Although
various scholarly works addressing the black British experience from literary, historical,
and cultural perspectives emerged during the 1980s (Arana 23-27), the
institutionalization of black British studies really began to take shape as the 1990s drew
to a close (Low and Wynne-Davies 2; Arana 32). Moreover, although “[w]riters such as
Hanif Kureishi . . . and, notoriously, Salman Rushdie began to emerge as figures of
national and international repute in the 1980s” (Gillespie 4), it was only in the late 1990s
that the category of black British fiction began to garner mainstream attention in Britain
and globally. During this time period, there were a plethora of publications by British
authors of Afro-Caribbean and Asian origin such as Andrea Levy, Diran Adebayo, Meera
Syal, Courttia Newland, and Bernadine Evaristo that caught the eye of the British public.
Some Kind of Black (1996) – a novel written by Adebayo – was awarded numerous
literary prizes (Arana 31-34). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Zadie Smith’s
White Teeth (2000) and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), their debut novels, were
immensely popular among British and international readers. These texts also accumulated
prestigious awards,1 and were praised in the media for commemorating multiculturalism

1 Smith’s White Teeth won many prizes; these included The Whitbread Award for First Novel
and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction 2001. Ali’s Brick Lane was awarded the
British Book Award for Newcomer of the Year.
2
and evoking a changing Britain at the turn of the century (Procter, “New Ethnicities, the
Novel, and the Burdens of Representation” 111-13).
Whereas the first generation of black British writers encompasses authors such as
Samuel Selvon, George Lamming, V.S. Naipaul, Wilson Harris, and E.K. Braithwaite,
who migrated to London from the West Indies during the 1950s and created a very large
body fiction over the next few decades (Procter, Writing Black Britain 13-15), writers
like Kureishi, Adebayo, Levy, Syal, Newland, Ali, and Smith are commonly categorized
as second-generation black British authors. Other notable authors who are grouped into
the latter category include David Dabydeen, Atima Srivasta, Hari Kunzru, Caryl Phillips,
and Jackie Kay. According to James Procter, the works of second-generation writers, like
those of their first generation predecessors, exhibit a desire for “dwelling places”
(Dwelling Places 1) – such as homes, streets, and neighborhoods – that they can claim as
their own (1, 14-15). The fictions of both generations of writers convey a longing for
rootedness in Britain and are fundamentally concerned with “the politics of place,
location and territory” (14). Analogously, John McLeod and John Clement Ball claim that
the newer and older generations of black British writers redefine London by contesting
the dominant power structure and challenging imperial narratives of the city (McLeod,
Postcolonial London 9-15; Ball 9).
Nonetheless, there are significant differences between the two generations. As
opposed to the earlier generation of writers, whose writings emphasize emotions of
isolation and homelessness, second-generation authors typically articulate frames of
reference that are British, identify as British citizens (Sesay 100, 102-07; Dawes 256-61),