{"title":"Reading against the Grain: Teaching The Long Song Intertextually","authors":"S. Welsh","doi":"10.1353/ari.2022.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2022.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article reflects on the deliberately situated and continuously evolving decolonizing strategies I have used to teach Andrea Levy's The Long Song in the decade since its first publication in 2010. I suggest some of the ways in which teachers and educators can include both Levy's novel and the 2018 three-part BBC television adaptation in their teaching. Key to my pedagogical approach is enacting critical reflexivity and teaching students to read contrapuntally or \"against the grain\" using a Caribbean archive of historiographical intertexts to the novel, sources which Levy herself used while writing The Long Song. The article suggests teaching approaches that not only allow for an aesthetic appreciation of The Long Song as a literary text but also facilitate wider political discussions of race, difference, and \"history\" and a critically informed response to wider transnational contexts—such as Britain's often occluded colonial and black Atlantic history or Canada's reassessment of its history of \"polite racism.\" On one level, Levy's final novel can be read as a compelling neo-slave narrative, a historiographic metafiction that playfully and self-consciously probes the nature of narrative and how H/history is constructed. However, it is also important to read the novel within a Caribbean and black Atlantic context, rather than simply as historical fiction or as an example of postmodern playfulness. I examine how looking at the novel's contexts and intertexts can shape an understanding of the novel as a response to a wider archive of white colonial writers as well as other important—though less privileged—sources, such as slave narratives. These, I argue, are key to a wider understanding of the novel and its focus on the nature of textuality, the different valencies of oral and written storytelling, and the crucial question of how history is written.","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"53 1","pages":"193 - 217"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44334007","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Afterlives, Aftermaths: Levy Studies in the Twenty-First Century","authors":"Henghameh Saroukhani, S. Welsh, Michael Perfect","doi":"10.1353/ari.2022.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2022.0001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"53 1","pages":"24 - 7"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46011271","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Some Unsung Songs: Andrea Levy's Late, Unpublished Works","authors":"Michael Perfect","doi":"10.1353/ari.2022.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2022.0010","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores projects which Andrea Levy worked on in her final years but which did not come to light during her lifetime. Drawing extensively on material found in Levy's personal archive, it considers the form, scope, aims, and qualities of these works. It also reflects on some links between them, as well as how they relate to her published oeuvre. In particular, this article highlights the politically engaged nature of much of Levy's late unpublished work. The first part of the article explores material from Levy's archive relating to a possible sixth novel. This is followed by a detailed discussion of the project in which Levy came to be most invested during her final years: a documentary television series on the historical relationship between Britain and the Caribbean. In collaboration with others, Levy developed and pitched this series, ultimately unsuccessfully, to the BBC. This article addresses Levy's intentions for and development of the project itself as well as her subsequent reflections on its rejection. The article then discusses a screenplay that Levy wrote based on Mary Seacole's autobiography. In retelling Seacole's story, Levy's screenplay deftly explores the ways in which that story came to be overshadowed. The last section of the article explores projects that Levy contemplated in the final years of her life but did not significantly develop. It also discusses the short piece \"Two,\" which was found in Levy's archive after her death.","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"53 1","pages":"257 - 291"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46210496","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Redressing Racist Legacies in the Melancholic Nation: Anger and Silences in Andrea Levy's Fruit of the Lemon","authors":"Vedrana Veličković","doi":"10.1353/ari.2022.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2022.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:\"I am the bastard child of Empire and I will have my day,\" declares Faith, the narrator of Andrea Levy's Fruit of the Lemon (1999), upon her return to England from Jamaica and after a catalogue of racial microaggressions that Levy carefully unfolds in the first part of the novel. Focusing largely on this portion of the novel, this article looks at how Faith's experiences of racialised trauma are a direct consequence of the melancholic state of the nation. It draws on Sara Ahmed's figure of the angry black woman, Audre Lorde's pioneering work on anger as a response to racism, and Anne Anlin Cheng's and Paul Gilroy's work to explore how the novel addresses racial and postcolonial melancholia. Paying close attention to the formal developments in Levy's work, particularly her use of ellipses and the defamiliarising effects of her openings and endings, I examine the novel's complex engagement with silences, anger, and racism. Like Small Island (2004) and her other novels, Fruit of the Lemon brings multiple and contesting collective and personal histories into direct collision from its very first sentence. The novel presents readers with \"the suffering racial body\" (Cheng 29) from the very beginning and, like Levy's other works, urges readers to keep on \"looking at the historical, cultural and cross racial consequences of racial wounding and to situate these effects as crucial, formative elements of individual, national and cultural identities\" (Cheng 94). By looking closely at the workings of racial politics in the novel and the ways in which various expressions of anger are silenced and/or articulated, I argue that Faith's situation is complicated because the nation is melancholic in its relation to its colonial history and the raced other.","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"53 1","pages":"107 - 77"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44067138","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Literary Legacies of Black Britain and Black Canada: A Comparative Reading of Andrea Levy's and Austin Clarke's Early Works","authors":"Andrea Medovarski","doi":"10.1353/ari.2022.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2022.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay offers a comparative, transnational reading of Andrea Levy's first two novels—Every Light in the House Burnin' (1994) and Never Far from Nowhere (1996)—and Austin Clarke's Toronto Trilogy—The Meeting Point (1967), Storm of Fortune (1973), and The Bigger Light (1975). These early works bear striking similarities to one another; they are also notably different from those of the Windrush generation, the first wave of Caribbean writers such as George Lamming and Samuel Selvon who published in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. While the Windrush writers framed themselves and their works as articulating a Caribbean consciousness, both Levy's and Clarke's early texts demonstrate a profound interest in exploring Britain and Canada, the spaces from which the authors wrote and in which their novels are set. Levy and Clarke display a similar literary commitment to negotiating a place for Blackness in nations that were, in the 1960s and 1970s, actively hostile to non-white people. Their early novels indict and hold their respective nations accountable for their marginalization of the Black immigrants and their descendants who are, or will become, their legal if not their social citizens. The essay also examines the various literary traditions in which Levy and Clarke are—or are not—positioned and how they situate themselves vis-à-vis their respective nations. By insistently naming themselves, their characters, and their works as English and Canadian, respectively, they write against dominant narratives that use their Caribbean ancestry to attach them to elsewhere.","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"53 1","pages":"47 - 75"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48825470","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Work, Gratitude, and \"The Good Immigrant\": Rereading Andrea Levy's Every Light in the House Burnin' (1994) and Never Far from Nowhere (1996) after the Windrush Scandal","authors":"F. Tolan","doi":"10.1353/ari.2022.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2022.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Written more than twenty years before the Windrush scandal broke, Every Light in the House Burnin' and Never Far from Nowhere foreshadow the British state's betrayal of the Windrush generation and express scepticism of the promise that respectable work leads to acceptance and equality in British society. In these novels, Levy interrogates the figure of \"the good immigrant\" and exposes the precarity of her Windrush-generation protagonists. While older characters keep their heads down, their British-born children assert their right to be ungrateful and unhappy, just like anyone else. Returning to these works in the light of the Windrush scandal, I examine Levy's early preoccupation with the same anxieties around the figure of the needy, unworthy immigrant she later raises in her short story \"Loose Change.\" I focus specifically on the role of work and education in the immigrant experience and argue that Levy's early 1990s works speak directly to the urgent questions highlighted by the Windrush scandal around national identity and belonging.","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"53 1","pages":"25 - 46"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48210536","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time by Filippo Menozzi (review)","authors":"P. Huebener","doi":"10.1353/ari.2022.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2022.0016","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"53 1","pages":"320 - 322"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43164564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Two","authors":"A. Levy","doi":"10.1353/ari.2022.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2022.0014","url":null,"abstract":". In this article, we study the diameter two properties (D2Ps), the diametral diameter two properties (diametral D2Ps), and the Daugavet property in Orlicz-Lorentz spaces equipped with the Luxemburg norm. First, we characterize the Radon-Nikod´ym property of Orlicz-Lorentz spaces in full generality by considering all finite real-valued Orlicz functions. To show this, the fundamental functions of their K¨othe dual spaces defined by extended real-valued Orlicz functions are computed. We also show that if an Orlicz function does not satisfy the appropriate ∆ 2 -condition, the Orlicz-Lorentz space and its order-continuous subspace have the strong diameter two property. Consequently, given that an Orlicz function is an N-function at infinity, the same condition characterizes the diameter two properties of Orlicz-Lorentz spaces as well as the octahedralities of their K¨othe dual spaces. The Orlicz-Lorentz function spaces with the Daugavet property and the diametral D2Ps are isometrically isomorphic to L 1 when the weight function is regular. In the process, we observe that every locally uniformly nonsquare point is not a ∆-point. This fact provides another class of real Banach spaces without ∆-points. As another application, it is shown that for Orlicz-Lorentz spaces equipped with the Luxemburg norm defined by an N-function at infinity, their K¨othe dual spaces do not have the local diameter two property, and so as other (diametral) diameter two properties and the Daugavet property.","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"53 1","pages":"313 - 315"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47649758","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Hostile Environment: The Conflicted Cosmopolitics of Andrea Levy's Small Island","authors":"Henghameh Saroukhani","doi":"10.1353/ari.2022.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2022.0005","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"53 1","pages":"109 - 137"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46014372","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sudeep Sen: Selected Conversations and Interviews by Sudeep Sen (review)","authors":"J. Chattaraj","doi":"10.1353/ari.2022.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2022.0017","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"53 1","pages":"323 - 325"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41793580","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}