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

Yıl 2018, Cilt: 16 Sayı: 4, 349 - 366, 30.12.2018

Elif Öztabak Avcı

Öz

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.

Anahtar Kelimeler

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

Kaynakça

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