SHIFTING “LIMITS OF TOLERANCE AND BELONGING” IN ANDREA LEVY’S FICTION: AN ENCOUNTER WITH THE REFUGEE IN “LOOSE CHANGE”

Year 2018, Volume: 16 Issue: 4, 349 - 366, 30.12.2018

Elif Öztabak Avcı

Abstract

Andrea Levy’s short story “Loose Change”
(2014) focuses on an unsettling encounter between the narrator, a black British
woman, who identifies herself as a “Londoner,” and a homeless refugee woman,
Laylor, from Uzbekistan. It is my claim that the unsympathetic attitude of the
narrator to a refugee woman in need of help is indicative of the text’s
emphasis on “relational” and “historically variable” positioning of diasporic
formations (Brah, 1996, p. 180) and of Levy’s brave tackling of the following
question raised by Alison Donnell: “Does the success that writers and other
cultural practitioners have had in ensuring that the black in black Britishness
has now arrived at a point of much fuller and complex self-representation, mean
that black writers no longer need to contest the nation?” (Donnell, 2002, p.
17). In “Loose Change,” Levy continues with contesting the nation, yet this
time her emphasis falls upon “a new group of people in Britain that seem to
mark the limits of tolerance and belonging, the threshold between in and out”
(Donnell, 2002, p. 17); i.e. the refugee.

Keywords

Andrea Levy, Six Stories and an Essay, “Loose Change, ” black British

References

• Amine, L. (2007). A house with two doors? Creole nationalism and nomadism in multicultural London. Culture, Theory & Critique, 48(1), 71-85. Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Brah, A. (1996). Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge. Donnell, A. (2002). Nation and contestation: black British writing. Wasafiri, 17(36), 11-17. Duboin, C. (2011). Contested identities: migrant stories and liminal selves in Andrea Levy’s Small Island. Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora, 12(1), 14-33. Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Gui, W. (2012). Post-heritage narratives: migrancy and travelling theory in V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival and Andrea Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 47(1), 73-89. Hall, S. (1996). New ethnicities. In D. Morley, & K.-H. Chen (Eds.), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (pp. 441-449). London: Routledge. (Reprinted from ICA Documents 7: Black Film, British Cinema, edited by Kobena Mercer, 1989) James, C. (2010). ‘You’ll soon get used to our language’: language, parody, and West Indian identity in Andrea Levy’s Small Island. Journal of West Indian Literature, 18(2), 45-64. Levy, A. (1994). Every Light in the House Burnin'. London: Headline Review. Levy, A. (1996). Never Far from Nowhere. London: Headline Review. Levy, A. (1999). Fruit of the Lemon. London: Review. Levy, A. (2000, February 19). This is my England. The Guardian, 01 May 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/feb/19/society1. Levy, A. (2004). Small Island. London: Review. Levy, A. (2010). The Long Song. London: Headline Review. Levy, A. (2014). Six Stories and an Essay. London: Headline Publishing. Levy, A. (2005). Andrea Levy in conversation with Susan Alice Fischer. (S.A.Fischer, Interviewer) Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education, 12(3), 361-371. McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. New York: Routledge. Öztabak-Avcı, E. (2017). 'Playing bad for white ears': a study of the narratee in Andrea Levy's The Long Song. JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, 47(1), 117-142. Perfect, M. (2010). 'Fold the paper and pass it on’: historical silences and the contrapuntal in Andrea Levy’s fiction. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 46(1), 31-41. Phillips, C. (1991). Worlds within: an interview with Caryl Phillips. (C. R. Bell, Interviewer) Callaloo, 14(3), 578-606.