A Hostile Environment: The Conflicted Cosmopolitics of Andrea Levy's Small Island

Abstract

Abstract:The critical consensus around Andrea Levy's award-winning Windrush-era novel Small Island (2004) is that it depicts, as Mike Phillips encapsulates in his Guardian review, "some of the most un-pleasant racist aspects of the period, without displaying any sense of polemical intent." This article works against the notion that Levy's writing is unpolemical—in other words, primarily conciliatory or diplomatic. By drawing attention to the neglected antinational polemics of Small Island, the article examines the way in which the novel offers a particularly condemning view of the national mythos surrounding post-war Commonwealth migration from the colonies and the seemingly progressive enactment of nationalization projects, such as universal social welfare in 1948. Small Island's critical view of the nation, one that has become newly legible in the aftermath of Teresa May's hostile environment policy and the 2018 Windrush scandal, remains, however, in tension with its quadripartite narrative structure. Levy's attempt to compose a structural form of cosmopolitanism that admirably crosses the boundaries of race, gender, and cultural circumstance becomes the site of its distinctly conflicted cosmopolitics: the novel on a structural level advances a conciliatory, cosmopolitan discourse that clashes with its more pessimistic anti-national commentary. Recognizing the tension in Small Island between aesthetic form and national critique enables a reading of Levy's prose that registers the uneven yet bleaker and more subversive ways in which she represents the enduring coloniality of post-war Britain.