July's People: Adoption and Kinship in Andrea Levy's Fiction

Abstract:This essay sees Andrea Levy's prolonged preoccupation with matters of family, kinship, and adoption as central to her literary articulation of race, empire, and slavery. It explores how Levy presents the colonial legacies that have entangled Britain and Jamaica as distinctly bodily affairs that impact upon kinship and family-making and argues that her representation of these histories is part of her firm attempt to expose the centrality of colonialism and slavery to the constitution of both Britain and Britons. Yet in pursuing this vital and politically urgent task, Levy risks upholding the synchronisation of corporis and cultura—the body and its historical cultivation—essential to colonial modernity's exalting of "blood cultures" that assume the sanguinary transfusion of historical and cultural particulars within the body itself. This risk can be sighted particularly in Levy's representation of transracial adoption and her appropriation of the rhetoric of "illegitimate" kinship. With particular reference to The Long Song (2010), the essay considers how Levy's invaluable attention to the history of forced adoptions at the heart of slavery's brutality is problematised by adoption's figurative requisitioning for wider (well-intentioned) critical purposes. Ultimately, the essay claims that Levy's laudable literary mission does not always exert sustained pressure on the biocentric norms of colonial modernity's sanguinary imagination.