The Experience of Hybridity in Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore and Andrea Levy’s Small Island

Abstract

Traumatized by the civil war in his homeland during the postcolonial period, the African Solomon takes refuge in England where he encounters hatred, violence, and death instead of finding home. He is an immigrant whose hybridity does not allow him a survival from the standard of Englishness. In contrast to Solomon’s unsuccessful hybridization, the Jamaican immigrants Hortense and Gilbert’s multiculturalism encourages them to raise voice against intolerant racism in the post-imperial England, the “mother country”, that attracted peoples of ex-colonies with its promise of a better life. By focusing on some key concepts of post-colonial literary theory, this paper proposes that Caryl Phillips and Andrea Levy differ in their treatments of hybridity although they are transnational Black writers.

Keywords

• Hybridity
• Migration
• Englishness
• Alienation
• Black

Thanks

Karabük University LALTS Organizing Committee

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