- 1 In his 2001 speech to the Social Market Foundation in London—better known under the derisive nickna (...)
1According to the OED, the main definition of the noun ‘transition’ is ‘change’ (OED 2024). At the end of the 1990s, change was what Tony Blair’s government wanted to implement so that Britain could successfully compete on a globalised world stage. A crucial factor of a nation’s economic and political success entailed giving the impression of peaceful coexistence between different cultures. Multiculturalism was thus promoted by political propaganda as the embodiment of Britain’s shift away from its colonial past since, according to then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, it was meant to replace the old-fashioned way of defining British identity through race and ethnicity (Cook).1 However, in reality, multiculturalism rather confirmed Britain’s unwillingness to change and highlighted how the nation’s identity was actually rooted in fixity. Indeed, according to Kittitian-British writer Caryl Phillips, and Guyanese-British scholar Mike Phillips, under the guise of fostering respect, equality and openness between cultures, multiculturalism allowed to perpetuate colonial-era practices of cultural hierarchisation and racial discrimination. Caryl Phillips highlighted how ‘in such [multicultural] societies, there will always be one dominant culture and a hotchpotch of others which are, by definition, lesser’ (2002, 279). As for Mike Phillips, he suggested that multiculturalism ‘had become a useful tool for maintaining the barriers originally put in place by racial discrimination’ (138).
- 2 The popular representation of the first Windrush generation as pioneering multiculturalism in Brita (...)
- 3 See for example Cecile Wright and Roda Madziva’s article ‘The Windrush Scandal: Citizenship, Politi (...)
2Both of these writers’ analyses of the paradoxically static nature of the multicultural transition in Britain are all the more relevant in light of the 2018 Windrush Scandal, which shattered any remaining illusions of change associated with multiculturalism. In that year, members of the first Windrush generation, who were considered the pioneers of multiculturalism by the wider British public,2 lost their medical coverage, jobs, homes and, for some of them, were even deported under the government’s ‘Hostile Environment’ policy. It was later revealed that this community had not been the victim of an administrative mistake but had been specifically targeted because of their race and ethnicity by the Home Office (Gentleman 13). The very possibility of change was thus called into question: many now shared the view that the national narrative of progress and unity had no more prospects,3 seemingly catching up with insights long emphasised by novelists of the Caribbean diaspora addressing the Windrush, the Second World War and/or 1970s South Asian migrations, such as Caryl Phillips, but also Sam Selvon, Andrea Levy and Zadie Smith.
- 4 In his article ‘The Myth of Liberal Humanism’ (2013), citing the example of Thomas Babington Macaul (...)
3However, while these novelists of the first or second Windrush generation foreground the paradox of the static nature of the multicultural change in Britain, showcasing how its repeated failures keep on primarily and negatively affecting racial and ethnic minority communities, their vision may be said to be simultaneously nuanced if we consider that their writing is rekindling a hope for change in Britain. To get back to definitions, the verb ‘to transition’ can either mean ‘to bring from one state or place to another’ or ‘to undergo a transition from one state or place to another’ (OED 2023). I argue that Selvon, Phillips, Levy and Smith relate to the active rather than passive definition of change as they chose to engage with the realist novel, a literary form that scholars have argued is the most in tune with the progressive but exclusionary liberal humanist ideals that form the basis of the national narrative. These ideals, which Benita Parry summarises as ‘justice, culture, liberty, freedom’ (43), may be said to be exclusionary in that they tend to come at the expense of other cultural traditions.4 However, by appropriating the liberal humanist ideals of the novelistic genre and illustrating how its representations of other cultures can be reworked and shifted, Selvon, Phillips, Levy and Smith demonstrate that British identity is not static but based on a dynamic transcultural principle, thus opening up perspectives of actual and lasting change.
4This dynamic transcultural principle can be summed up as ‘constructive deconstruction’ in the words of transcultural theorist Mikhail Epstein. According to Epstein, a culture tends to become static over time and its deterministic tendencies need to be deconstructed, in the Derridean sense (339). However, culture is also ‘constructive’, as it is flexible and provides possibilities for individuals to reshape it (Epstein 330). This positive outlook on the nature of culture as being open to change under outside influence recalls Mary Louise Pratt’s theory of the colonial ‘contact zone’ as a place in which dominant and minority cultures influence one another reciprocally in spite of power asymmetry (7), a perspective which is shared by scholars of the Caribbean diaspora in Britain. Indeed, in his essay ‘Broken Borders—Migration, Modernity and English Writing—Transcultural Transformation in the Heart of Europe’ (2009), Mike Phillips argued against a postcolonial characterisation of Britain as an immutable racist culture resistant to change. Instead, he suggested that British identity is transcultural, citing the transformative role black British writers have had in the past and will have in the future, as according to him, they will achieve cultural coexistence if not unity (M. Phillips 148–149). This vision seems in keeping with some of the dynamics at work in Sam Selvon’s Moses Ascending (1975), Caryl Phillips’s ‘Somewhere in England’ chapter from Crossing the River (1993), Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004) and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) and NW (2012).
5While these works have been analysed through the postcolonial lens, their transcultural potential has not been fully tapped into, although a few literary scholars suggested it. Tammy Amiel Houser and Hari Kunzru thus highlighted how NW and Moses Ascending ‘write back’ to multiculturalism, either, in the case of the former, by debunking the neoliberal rhetorics of empathy as a conveyor of social connection and betterment across class and cultural divides (Amiel Houser 45), or, in the case of the latter, by revealing the persistent inequalities between the Black and White communities (Kunzru xvi). As for Valeria Polopoli and John McLeod, they have established that Small Island and Crossing the River present the nature of national identity as provisional, the result of cultural negotiation (Polopoli 113) or affiliation (McLeod 55). But the prospects of cultural rehabilitation and unity that transculturalism may entail, and which, I argue, are to some extent at work in these novels, have not been thoroughly examined. They have nonetheless been intuited by the likes of McLeod, Bénédicte Ledent, Kunzru and James Wood, who have respectively commented on Levy’s, Phillips’s, Selvon’s and Smith’s novels leading towards ‘the affiliative possibilities of the future’ (McLeod 54), a ‘post-migratory Britishness’ (Ledent 76), ‘a future lit by a brighter sun’ (Kunzru xvii) and a renewed sense of ‘steady, clear, realistic genius’ (Wood).
- 5 Caryl Phillips analyses how ‘racial purity’ was progressively forged as a criterion for national be (...)
6This paper thus argues that by revealing how seemingly fixed aspects of British identity emerge in part from cultural interactions during moments of transition, and by reworking recent problematic representations of minority cultures, Selvon, C. Phillips, Levy, and Smith align with Mike Phillips’s vision of Britain as transcultural and open to change, thereby renewing hope for future cultural unity and progress. I will first analyse how Levy, Selvon and Smith each present the concept of ‘racial purity’, considered a fixture of British cultural identity,5 to some extent as the result of transculturation during periods of cultural transition before and after the arrival of the first Windrush generation. I will then examine how Levy and Smith, writing at the end of Britain’s multicultural era, manage to renegotiate minority selfhoods within British culture by subverting nationalist portrayals of Caribbean and South Asian migration as symbols of national decline. Finally, I will look at how C. Phillips and Levy suggest that Britain has the potential of being a positive space of cultural coexistence despite colonial heritage by showing how characters are able to change their perspective of Britain and view it as a place where change may occur and where there can be relationality beyond racial and ethnic barriers.
7To begin with, Levy, Selvon, and Smith, like Mike Phillips, challenge deterministic portrayals of Britain as a culture that ‘inevitably destroys or drives out its inferior’ (M. Phillips 139). Instead, they show that the obsession with ‘racial purity’ is not a fixture of British thought but also emerged to some extent through transcultural exchanges with America and the Caribbean and South Asian diasporas in moments of transition before and after the arrival of the Windrush generation. In doing so, they align with M. Phillips’s more hopeful vision of Britain as a space shaped by cultural interaction and still open to change.
- 6 According to Michael S. Kimmel, an increased obsession with racial ‘purity’ and ‘control’ on the pa (...)
8In Levy’s Small Island, Gilbert, a Black working-class Jamaican who volunteers for the RAF during the Second World War, arrives in Britain with confidence in British values. He sees the country as his Motherland, views his mission as a patriotic duty and initially interprets the presence of a racially integrated force as proof that Britain is not plagued by America’s obsession with ‘racial purity’, which, as Michael S. Kimmel argues in Manhood in America: A Cultural History (1996), is associated with the development of an extreme vision of masculinity by white American men in reaction to the increased presence of Black men in the workplace during the Reconstruction and WW1 eras (Kimmel 63–64, 144).6 Gilbert believes such extreme racism to be confined to the American context, a conviction reflected in his ironic pun ‘uncivil war’ (Levy 190), which he uses to describe racial tensions among American troops and refer back to the US Civil War. This belief is further reinforced by the repeated refrain of affirmation and negation—‘“This is England,” I said. “This is not America” . . . ‘This is England, not Alabama’“ (Levy 184–185)—which highlights the perceived cultural distinction between the two nations. However, the novel later shows how this confidence is eroded. In the cinema scene, violent conflict between white and black American GIs spills over to British troops. A white British soldier adopts the racial slurs and baton tactics of the white American men to assault Gilbert, an act that symbolically marks the ideological transfer of racialised thinking. Left reeling, Gilbert exclaims, ‘—but come, tell me, someone . . . which war?’ (Levy 193). The punctuation, which combines a dash with an ellipsis and a rhetorical question, conveys his ultimate disorientation. The scene may suggest that British racial prejudice was not entirely innate, but also learned and shaped by wartime contact with American racial ideologies.
9Selvon and Smith add on to Levy’s analysis of the transcultural nature of British identity by presenting the way in which the Caribbean and South Asian communities developed their own obsession with racial purity in relation to the white community’s. In Moses Ascending, Selvon highlights how the more radical rhetoric on identity by British members of the Black Power movement in the 1970s was shaped by that of British white male supremacists. Indeed, during a rally scene, a Black Power leader delivers a speech, whose sanctimonious tone and apocalyptic metaphor of the fall of Britain directly echoes Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech: ‘if we can’t get justice and humanity through Christianity, we would have to resort to the sword, and he was sorry to say it, but that white blood would flow like water ere we attained our rightful desires’ (Selvon 122). The passage obviously foregrounds the absurdity of British white supremacist discourse by playing into its ideology of radical cultural difference and racial war, as the Black Power leader’s simile (‘white blood would flow like water’) is a caricatural direct answer to Powell’s ‘foreboding’ that ‘like the Roman, [he] seem[s] to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”’ (Powell). Yet Selvon simultaneously uses irony to reflect on the transcultural nature of the obsession with racial purity exhibited by more radicalised members of the black community. He does so by showing that, in spite of their rhetoric of cultural irreconciliation, the Black Power leader shares the same cultural values and references—‘justice’, ‘humanity’, ‘Christianity’ and Virgil’s Aeneid—as the British white supremacists. In this respect, Selvon’s critique aligns with bell hooks’s analysis of how Black men, under the pressures of colonisation and racial domination, have at times adopted epic and conquering models of masculinity similar to those of white patriarchal culture, in an effort to reclaim power within a society structured against them (hooks 2–3). Irony is also used by Zadie Smith in White Teeth to highlight how a working-class Bengali character’s fear of diluting her ethnic heritage arises in relation to an upper middle-class white British woman’s eugenic discourse:
Even the unflappable Alsana Iqbal would regularly wake up in a puddle of her own sweat after a night visited by visions of Millat (genetically BB; where B stands for Bengali-ness) marrying someone called Sarah (aa where ‘a’ stands for Aryan), resulting in a child called Michael (Ba), who in turn marries somebody called Lucy (aa), leaving Alsana with a legacy of unrecognizable great-grandchildren (Aaaaaaa!), their Bengali-ness thoroughly diluted, genotype hidden by phenotype. (2001, 327)
10As the Bengali character Alsana Iqbal envisions the dissolution of Bengali (‘B’) blood into Aryan (‘A’) blood, the onomatopoeic ‘Aaaaaaa!’ functions both as a cry of horror and the absurd conclusion of her pseudo-genealogic inquiry. However, Smith shows that Alsana’s obsession with racial purity is not rooted in Bengali prejudice but mirrors Joyce Chalfen’s own white British anxieties about preserving racial lineage: ‘Yes, self-pollination is the simpler . . . But a species cloning such uniform offspring runs the risk of having its entire population wiped out by a single evolutionary event. In the garden, as in the social and political arena, change should be the only constant’ (2001, 309). Thus opening the chapter with Joyce’s horticultural theory of controlled diversity ensuring a species’ survival, Smith suggests that Alsana’s concerns are shaped by, and reflect, dominant cultural fears about race.
11By tracing the British obsession with racial purity partly to wartime influence from America and evolving encounters with the Black and South Asian diasporas, Levy, Selvon, and Smith complexify fixed, deterministic conceptions of British identity. They expose racism, often framed as the ultimate example of permanence, as itself partly shaped by transculturation, and thus open to change. In doing so, they affirm, through irony and strategic exaggeration, Mike Phillips’s vision of migration as a driver of transcultural transformation. But more significantly, what signals a belief in Britain as a space still in transition is the novelists’ reappropriation of the liberal humanist ideals of the realist novel to subvert nationalist portrayals of Caribbean and South Asian migration.
12Mike Phillips identifies the ‘renegotiation of selfhood’ (148) as a key marker of transcultural dynamics, an insight anticipated by Mary Louise Pratt, who, in the 1990s, brought this reflection into the field of literary studies. Developing the concept of ‘autoethnographic expression’ (9) in relation to colonial ‘contact zones’, Pratt argued that transcultural dynamics become visible when subordinated or marginal groups write back to dominant representations by ‘select[ing] and invent[ing] from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture’ (7). Although the concept initially emerged from her analysis of travel literature, Pratt treats autoethnography more broadly as a dialogic mode of writing that involves ‘partly collaborating with and appropriating the idioms of the conqueror’ in order to address ‘both metropolitan readers and . . . the speaker’s own social group’ (9). Such writing not only ‘unrave[ls]’ rigid interpretative frameworks that fix cultures in static terms, but also attests to the agency of colonised subjects by demonstrating their capacity to ‘engage with the colonizer’s terms’ and reshape imposed identities (Pratt 7–9; original emphasis).
13Although neither Small Island nor NW belongs to the travel literature tradition, Levy and Smith may be read as producing a doubly autoethnographic form of transcultural expression. On the one hand, by reappropriating the liberal humanist realist novel to write back to white nationalist framings of the Windrush generation and South Asian immigration as symbols of national decline, they enact a renegotiation of ethnic minority selfhoods. On the other hand, they also write back to dominant models of conquering white masculinity, whose logics marginalise women across both majority and minority communities. In both respects, written at the end of Britain’s multicultural era, their novels challenge earlier multicultural narratives and foreground Britain as a culture still in transition rather than one defined by fixity.
14They do so first by unearthing the white community’s own disillusionment with the conquering and progressivist logics underpinning British identity. In Small Island and NW, the white British characters Bernard Bligh and Leah Hanwell struggle with British social, political and cultural values that have left them both with emotional disconnection and suicidal thoughts. Initially ‘an Englishman proud of his country, right or wrong’ (Levy 419), Bernard’s experience in the RAF in India during WW2 confronts him with the brutal realities masked by British propaganda, as he witnesses them first hand as a perpetrator of white colonising and patriarchal violence. The aftermath of his assault on an underage Indian sex worker, marked by his belated recognition of her youth and vulnerability—‘And only then did I see that she was nothing but a girl’ (Levy 413)—reveals to Bernard the damaging effects of British exoticising patriarchal representations. He retrospectively understands these depictions as serving to legitimise acts of violent conquest, in this case by constructing the underage sex worker as a dangerous, otherly femme fatale deserving of his violence, as her description recalling Orientalist portrayals of South Asian women as odalisques suggests: ‘Just took in a whore’s room. The coloured lights, the trinkets on the walls, the overpowering smell of jasmine. . . . Her scanty robe, bare breasts, naked behind’ (Levy 413). Bernard’s disillusionment culminates in his reflection that ‘England had shrunk. It was smaller than the place I’d left’ (Levy 424), a peremptory line that encapsulates his recognition of Britain’s moral diminishment and resonates with the novel’s title, Small Island.
15Similarly, in NW, Smith highlights the tension between apparent multicultural progress and persistent gendered constraints in British society. While Michel, Leah’s Guadeloupean husband, celebrates their upward mobility with an appreciative tone—‘Dog. Car. Flat. Cooking together, like this. Seven years ago: you were on the dole. I was washing hair. Things change! We’re getting there, no?’ (Smith 2013, 24)—his controlling attitude toward Leah’s body, framed in the militaristic simile ‘we have to be a bit more, I mean, military about it, like plan’ (Smith 2013, 25), reveals how national narratives of progress remain entangled with expectations of control and conquest, particularly over women’s autonomy. Leah, burdened by social expectations to become a mother after securing a job and home, thus perceives life in Britain as a living hell, as the opening depiction of Willesden as a fallen paradise suggests. The hellish imagery of the ‘sulphurous’ paint and drifting ash, as well as the biblical reference to the ‘bitter little apples’ echoing Eve’s fall from grace (Smith 2013, 3) simultaneously reflect her sense of guilt for not being able to conform to British gender expectations and her disillusionment with a national model of success she does not embrace.
16Presenting the white community as partly responsible for its own sense of decline, Levy and Smith then also reframe the Windrush generation and South Asian immigration as crucial to its revitalising and to its positive change of values. In particular, the feminine dimensions of these migrations are portrayed as bearing a form of transcultural rebirth for white characters disillusioned with liberal humanist ideals. This renewal is staged through scenes of literal cultural contact in which an ethics of touch intervenes, enabling new forms of relation grounded in the recognition of vulnerability and mutual exposure rather than in the affective logics of multicultural empathy. While empathy, understood as ‘the immersion in another’s perspective’ (Serpell 7, quoted in Amiel Houser 119), is often promoted in neoliberal multicultural discourse as a moral corrective to social injustice, it reactivates monocultural assumptions of invulnerability and moral authority on the part of a dominant culture. By contrast, the ethics of touch establishes a more genuinely reciprocal relation in line with the ideals of transculturalism, as tactile contact reveals not only the vulnerability of the Other but also that of the self. As Dave Boothroyd observes in his reading of Levinas, touch, as the most archaic form of haptic communication, exposes subjects to their own fragility and dependence, opening the possibility of a reset of ethical relation, grounded in mutual tenderness rather than control (343).
17In Small Island, this logic is embodied in a baby named Michael, born from the clandestine union of a Caribbean character and a white woman, Queenie, married to Bernard. The reference to the biracial baby sucking on Bernard’s fingers ‘like it was nectar’ (Levy 509) is a telling simile through which Levy frames Bernard’s first contact with his wife’s baby as a rebirth. Indeed, ‘nectar’ etymologically means ‘to overcome death’ and is the drink conferring immortality in Greek mythology (Lehmann 269). Baby Michael, the result of the union between the white and Caribbean communities, not only revives the suicidal Bernard but also renews his hope for a changed life in Britain. Indeed, Bernard opens to Queenie about his wartime trauma in India while holding the child: ‘with Queenie listening I suddenly said, “I was in prison, you know.” . . . her son, no doubt—despite his skin. Spoke the words softly to him. Bare facts. . . . But the sorry tale none the less of why I couldn’t come home’ (Levy 510). This passage confirms that the cultural contact is what finally grounded Bernard enough to confront the values he had grown disillusioned with and to embrace an alternative, more vulnerable, relational, and ultimately resilient, form of masculinity.
- 7 Amiel Houser, for example, interprets Leah and Shar’s interaction in terms of patronisation and inv (...)
18As for Leah’s first encounter with South Asian woman Shar in NW, Smith frames it as a sacred moment, as the section title ‘visitation’ indicates, which alludes to Mary’s visitation of Elizabeth in the Gospel of Luke (Luke 1:39-56 KJV). Although Shar is later revealed to be a scammer and some critics interpret the scene as a failure of neoliberal multicultural empathy (Amiel Houser 128–130; Guignery 10), Smith’s descriptive narration conveys a genuine moment of ethical transcultural revitalisation through its depiction of the transformative powers of an ethics of touch. The scene can be read as exposing the fragility of empathy as an ethical posture, one that risks becoming self-serving for the dominant culture,7 wearing out and turning performative, much like the liberal humanist novelistic narrative itself, which Smith ironises when she notes that ‘nothing survives its telling’ (Smith 2013, 14). However, the encounter also exceeds the limits of empathy understood as one-sided imaginative immersion devoid of responsibility. Leah shows care for Shar by making sure she makes it safely to the hospital, while Shar, in turn, goes out of her way to soothe a visibly distressed Leah by taking her face in her hands, kissing her, and calling her ‘spiritual’. Leah responds with a spontaneous blessing, ‘God bless you’, a phrase the narrator notes she has never uttered before (Smith 2013, 14). This brief but reciprocal haptic exchange marks a moment of spiritual rebirth for Leah, triggering a journey of introspection that frees her from societal expectations and leads to her decision to have an abortion.
19Small Island and NW thus both renegotiate selfhoods by depicting some instances of first encounters between the white majority and the Caribbean and South Asian diasporas as revitalising and mutually constructive. That they do so while writing at the end of Britain’s multicultural era, a period criticised for its apparent cultural stagnation, suggests a vision of Britain as still in transition, where meaningful cultural dialogue and change remain possible. This view of cultural relations is ultimately embodied in characters who shift their perceptions of Britain, a dynamic that for Mike Phillips exemplifies the transcultural project of ‘re-creating a single culture with very different facets’ (149).
20According to M. Phillips, transcultural writing is not ‘only’ about showing how different cultures ‘coexist’ within the same space, but also about opening up perspectives of cultural unity (149). This process involves rehabilitating the dominant culture by making room for difference, a transition that both Caryl Phillips and Andrea Levy depict in Crossing the River and Small Island through the characters of Joyce and Hortense. Joyce, a white British woman during WW2, and Hortense, a Jamaican member of the first Windrush generation, thus move from disaffiliation from Britain to a renewed sense of belonging to British culture through connection and negotiation across cultural, racial, ethnic, and gender divides. Crucially, these novels present women, particularly those marginalised within the dominant culture, including white working-class women and women from migrant communities, as key agents of transcultural mediation, whose negotiation of difference towards unity also implies a reconfiguration of British patriarchy.
21Both Joyce and Hortense initially disaffiliate from British identity as their experiences during WW2 or the Windrush migration leave them feeling betrayed by British society. Indeed, Joyce witnesses not only her husband Len’s and the other white British townspeople’s racism towards the African American GIs, but also their cynicism towards British values, best encapsulated in the passage describing the aftermath of the town’s bombing:
Fires were still blazing, but we couldn’t hear any more planes. Maybe it was over? Len whispered in my ear, I’m off to the pub. I’ll see you back later. I watched him and his mates walk off. I even heard them laughing. (C. Phillips 178)
22The contrast between the ongoing danger, highlighted by the present continuous form ‘were still blazing’, and Len’s flippant words and attitude, as he nonchalantly leaves the chaotic scene, creates a striking portrayal of moral abdication within the dominant white British community. But above all, it exposes this community’s paradoxical disregard for its own patriarchal ideals, as the national imperatives of loyalty, collective effort, justice and protection are closely associated with the traditional notions of gentility and respectability, which Ann Spry Rush identifies as foundational to Victorian morality and British national identity (10). Narrated from Joyce’s viewpoint, this passage is particularly telling of her sense of disaffiliation from British society, as the paratactical rhythm of her description conveys her own sense of disconnection from her community. In Small Island, Hortense’s sense of disaffiliation from British identity stems from being denied her relationship to the Mothercountry, as dramatised in her arrival scene:
As my feet had set down on the soil of England an Englishwoman approached me. She was breathless. Panting and flushed. She swung me round with a force that sent one of my coat buttons speeding into the crowd with the velocity of a bullet. (Levy 15)
23Not only is Hortense violently handled and rejected by a white British woman who allegorically embodies an irate and uncaring Britannia, but the gunshot metaphor (‘with the velocity of a bullet’) also suggests a symbolic killing of historical colonial links, and thus of Hortense’s filiation with, and legitimate claim to, British identity. This betrayal of the colonial filial bond is all the more painful as it relies on a contradiction of colourist and class hierarchies cultivated by the British Mothercountry itself. While educated to see herself as ‘a lady worthy’ (Levy 38) in Jamaica, on account of her lighter complexion and parentage (as the illegitimate daughter of a high-ranking white British colonial government official), Hortense is met in the Mothercountry with an undifferentiated racism that collapses former colonial distinctions into a uniform disavowal of non-white subjects.
24However, despite scenes of rejection, both Joyce and Hortense manage to rekindle their attachment to British culture through relationships with, respectively, an African American GI named Travis and the white British woman Queenie, bonds grounded not in racialised logics but in mutual recognition and emotional connection. In the dance scene in Crossing the River, Joyce notices Travis’s gap teeth and respectful demeanour, while he, in turn, is drawn to her kindness, traits valued for their individuality rather than racial connotations (C. Phillips 162–163). As for Hortense in Small Island, she moves from being initially suspicious of Queenie, whom she views as wanting to reenact master/slave dynamics—as her referencing the relationship between Scarlett O’Hara and her maid Prissy from Gone with the Wind (1936) suggests (Levy 477)—to admiring her when she witnesses Queenie’s sustained labour of care for her biracial son. Hortense thus recognises Queenie’s selflessness in stepping back and entrusting her black son to Hortense and her husband Gilbert so as to shield him from the social and cultural prejudice of postwar Britain. Their joint naming of Queenie’s child (Levy 517) concretises a symbolic birth and baptism of mutual respect, reflecting both women’s ability to move beyond their biases.
25These cross-cultural relationships are painstakingly but willingly cultivated by both parties: Joyce reaffirms her bond with the late Travis in the reunion scene with their son, through the epanorthosis ‘He was my son. Our son’ (C. Phillips 224), while Hortense agrees to share in the responsibility of raising Queenie’s son. However, more than envisioning ‘a moment of future possibility rather than nostalgic return’ to ideals of national belonging based on racial filiation (McLeod 52), these relations that cross both racial and gender lines showcase how migration and the negotiation of Britishness it involves may have the power to rehabilitate British culture.
26Thus, Joyce’s and Hortense’s ties to Travis and Queenie positively reshape their perspective on Britain not as a place of mere ‘coexistence’ of cultures rigidly divided by the dynamics of colonial and patriarchal history but as the site of possible transcultural unity and shared national pride. Joyce notably moves from disaffiliation from British culture to a renewed sense of affiliation thanks to Travis’s pride in it, symbolised in the scenes where he gives her daffodils:
But today everything is fine again, for he came into the shop with a big smile upon his face and a bunch of daffodils . . . he thought he’d like me to have them. (C. Phillips 166)
He was dressed smartly in his uniform and he was carrying yet more daffodils. I’ve brought you some more of these yellow flowers. I like how they look. I smiled.’ (C. Phillips 201)
27From her initial wariness at the view of the daffodils, likely due to their implicit colonial connotations, linked to Wordsworth’s poem ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ (1807) and its use in the imperial education system to assert Britain’s cultural superiority, Joyce is ultimately able to ‘rejoice’ in them through Travis, who reclaims them as a beautiful gift. Although himself a potential target of imperial education, Travis, with the peremptory declaration ‘I like how they look’, overturns colonial representations by reappropriating this British literary symbol as a personal and joyful gesture. Joyce’s answering smile at his proud reclaiming affirms this example of transcultural negotiation as a step towards the rehabilitation of, and renewed cultural belonging to, Britain.
28As for Hortense, her initial disillusionment with Britain, encapsulated in the very first chapter through the leitmotiv ‘Just this?’ when taking in the miserable condition of the room Queenie rents her—‘“Just this?” I had to sit on the bed. My legs gave way. There was no bounce underneath me as I fell. “Just this? This is where you are living? Just this?”’ (Levy 21)—is reinterpreted at the end of the novel. Once an expression of despair upon seeing her run-down London room and the racist disregard it seemed to imply, it becomes a phrase of hope and construction after Hortense has witnessed Queenie’s limited means and her motherly care and self-sacrifice for her biracial child’s well-being:
[Hortense’s] chin was high, her nose was in the air as her lips slowly parted and her breath sighed. ‘Just this?’ . . . ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘is it just this?’ . . . ‘Just this one room we are to have or are there any other rooms?’ . . . ‘Yes, it is a good room.’ . . . ‘We can fix it up.’ . . . ‘Gilbert, come, you no scared of a little hard work. I can help you.’ She spun round in the room. ‘With a little paint and some carpet.’ She moved to the corner leaning over to spread out her arms and say ‘And a table and chair here,’ before rushing to the fireplace with the suggestion, ‘and two armchairs here in front of an open English fire. You will see—we will make it nice.’ (Levy 502–504)
29In answer to Queenie’s attempt at negotiating a better future for her black baby, Hortense in turn finds a renewed sense of pride in British identity, as conveyed by her proud physical stance and her subsequent purposeful creative frenzy to rehabilitate a static, decrepit space by bringing to life a vision of a shared transcultural Caribbean and British domesticity.
30By portraying Britain as a transcultural space where dominant values are to an extent co-constructed through interaction with minority cultures, where selfhoods may be renegotiated, and where race, ethnicity and gender divisions need not define cultural relationships, Selvon, Phillips, Levy, and Smith offer an alternative vision to dominant media narratives. Rather than seeing Britain as locked in racial and colonial determinism, they present it as a society still in transition, capable of change, coexistence and even, with some effort, unity. Though such a vision may seem overly hopeful or risk accusations of a new determinism, Mike Phillips reminds us that it emerges from the realities of migration and thus carries both imaginative reach and pragmatic grounding:
So the meanings associated with this experience seem to open up a transcultural vista where it may become possible to accommodate all these elements in the same space without massacres, daily murders, orders. In this vision we see the future transformed, and it is a vision on which artists who emerge from the transcultural experience of migration have been nurtured, because there was no other way. And if it is a dream, it is the artist’s job to extend the reach of our imagination about the potential of real life and to dream dreams about how things could be if we had the will. (149)
31But most importantly, these authors remain self-reflective: they show that transition is not inevitable, but depends on the collective will to change, leaving the future open, not fixed.
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