White Ethnographies: Luke Sutherland’s Jelly Roll

Chapter 4 focuses on the literary registration of racismánd anti-racism in Scotland in Luke Sutherland’s Jelly Roll (1998). Sutherland’s novel is strongly marked by intertextual links to Irvine Welsh, and Jelly Roll attempts to re-materialise Black experience in the post-Trainspotting era of Scottish writing. The novel represents a new interpretation of the ‘Scottish journey’ undertaken by Romantics and Orcadians alike, where the cartographic objective is to represent the racialised topography of Scotland, to map its whiteness, and to imagine it as a violent ‘new geography of racism’. Central to that representation is the interrogation of anti-racism in Scotland, dominated by contradiction, machismo, and bourgeois posing that thwarts an effective resistance to racism.