Corinne Fowler

A Tale of Two Novels: Developing a Devolved Approach to Black British Writing

In October 2000, Penguin launched Zadie Smiths novel White Teeth. In the same month, Headline Review released a novel by Joe Pemberton. It was called Forever and Ever Amen. This article traces the differing fortunes of these two British novels and seeks to understand why Forever and Ever Amen, which was also a critical success, came nowhere near the sales or popular acclaim of White Teeth. It examines the commercial and (multi)cultural logic by which novels are coded as worthy of national and international readerships by corporate publishers and high street retail outlets. Emphasizing the significance of many black British novels that emerge from non-metropolitan glocalities, the author calls for a sustained focus by literary scholarship on the discomforting links between the political and literary economy. Most particularly, novels such as Pembertons invite popular and critical engagement with what James Procter has described as “devolved” diasporic cultures throughout Britain.

Articulation, Imagined Space and Virtual Mobility in Literary Narratives of Migration

As the blurred boundaries between documentary, memory and ‘re‐imaginings’ of personal experience have become more intensively theorised, creative writing is re‐emerging as an important resource in social science, following the extensive debates surrounding the sociology of literature in the 1960s and 1970s. This is especially true with regard to the type of mobility entailed by migration. This essay advances a methodology for incorporating creative fiction into mobilities research. It argues that certain types of literary text offer fresh perspectives on the overlapping layers of experience which characterise the mental condition resulting from cultural displacement, bringing together the historical, the global and the local within a single, multiply constituted, ‘imagined space’. Literary accounts of this kind can be characterised as a data source in their own right, complementing social science research methodologies grounded in ‘real‐life’ observation and offering hypotheses for subsequent ethnographic verification. Through the narrative processes of metaphorical transfer and space‐time compression, Joe Pembertons autobiographical novel Forever and Ever Amen (2000) demonstrates the potential of narratives informed by the experience of migration to present ‘alternative cartographies of social space’ (Rouse, 1991). The social relevance of such narrative representations is further demonstrated by their ‘envelopment’ within mainstream discourses, thereby illustrating how they ‘articulate’ with existing social norms.

Themed book review: John McLeod, Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis. London: Routledge, 2004. 224 pp. ISBN: 9780415344609,

character and the key role of a variety of networks of elites from a variety of institutional (and national) backgrounds. This allows the authors to transcend the facile characterizations that mark most popular, but also academic, understandings of the Union. Crucial, in this sense, is the role of the appointed leaders of the Constitutional Convention, very nicely highlighted here. The role of this ‘community of experts’ in shaping the terms of the discussion – in many ways, defining and delimiting the very ‘realms of possibility’ of the constitutional debate – stands in clear disjuncture with external/public representations of the convention, emphasizing openness and hailing a ‘democratization’ of EU decision-making mechanisms. The analysis of the power dynamics of the convention as ‘a method for producing consensus’ (pp. 92–102) is particularly compelling, reconstructing the power geometries that shaped the chances of various actors to make their voices heard and influence negotiations (the positioning and self-positioning of the accession states was especially interesting in this regard, with a curious process of ‘acculturation’ at play). The second important contribution of the book is its analysis of the frequent conflation of ‘Europe’ and the EU that marked the constitutional debates. As the authors rightly note, it was a semantic conflation, but also a very ‘real’ one (after all, every ‘geographical’ definition of Europe has distinct political and geopolitical effects!). In asking ‘what’ Europe was, the conventioneers inevitably also faced the question of ‘where’ Europe lay; what/where were its current and final borders? The interviews with the members of the convention cited by Krzyżanowski and Oberhuber reveal a surprising conceptual confusion in this regard, with interviewees not only frequently conflating the EU with ‘Europe’, but also often operating a problematic conflation of ‘concrete’ conceptions of Europe (institutional, legal, etc.) and much more ‘abstract’ or ‘ideational’ understandings of Europe as a specific ‘cultural’ and ‘geographical’ space. It was, indeed, quite striking to see how Europe’s ‘geography’ was appealed to by a significant number of the politicians interviewed in quite unproblematic terms: a ‘European geography’ evoked as both a description of a presumed ‘really existing Europe’ as well as a prescription for what Europe could/should become. Distinct geographical imaginations were thus utilized to bind (in quite fluid and often contradictory fashion) Europe’s past, present and future; its ‘here’ and ‘there’; what is (and was) European; and what/where may (or may not) become European. This is particularly interesting because all references to Europe’s ‘geography’ were actually willingly kept out of the final text of the Draft Constitutional Treaty (the official line was that any reference to Europe’s ‘geographical limits’ would be politically untenable). The great merit of Krzyżanowski and Oberhuber’s study is that it also reveals the unstated (though, for that, no less powerful) spatial politics behind the negotiations.