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Copyright West University of Timisoara, Faculty of Letters, History and Theology 2015

Abstract

[While visiting with my family the various pavilions ..] we got lost in Africa. [...] we found ourselves in an African village [...] [...]constructed by Levy as the space which allows the colonial encounter with the Other, the imperial exhibition reveals itself to be an ambivalent "Third Space" of cultural interpenetration (Bhabha 1994:37-38). Queenie, for her part, has to go through the war on her own, forced to find a way to survive the hard times and the new social order the war brought with it. [...]against any nationalist credo, and despite her neighbours' protests, she decides to rent rooms to the unwelcome black immigrants. [...]each character is British in his/her own way with a personal heritage and story and the characters all go to make up the British nation. [...]by exposing the cultural and national identities of the characters as socially constructed, dynamic and open to change (Hall 1992), Levy shows the fictive character of nationhood and how the British "ethnoscape" can no longer be conceived "as tightly territorialised, spatially bounded, historically unselfconscious, or culturally homogeneous" (Appadurai 2008:48). [...]the novel deconstructs the correspondence between whiteness and the British nation and questions the hegemonic articulation of national identity.

Details

Title
NARRATING NATIONHOOD: CONSTRUCTED IDENTITIES IN ANDREA LEVY'S SMALL ISLAND
Author
Polopoli, Valeria
Pages
109-116,231-232
Publication year
2015
Publication date
2015
Publisher
West University of Timisoara, Faculty of Letters, History and Theology
ISSN
12243086
e-ISSN
24577715
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
1705538412
Copyright
Copyright West University of Timisoara, Faculty of Letters, History and Theology 2015