Sara Upstone

“SAME OLD, SAME OLD”

Close examination of White Teeth and Brick Lane illustrates why postcolonial frameworks continue to be relevant when discussing “black British literature”. To differing degrees, both these novels maintain postcolonial contexts in their representation of British‐born black and Asian individuals, even as they express the confidence of this new generation. This paper addresses how the tensions between British‐born confidence and familiar tropes of migrant alienation may call into question readings of these novels that emphasize their uniqueness and positivity.

Postmodern literature and race

Postmodern Literature and Race explores the question of how dramatic shifts in conceptions of race in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been addressed by writers at the cutting edge of equally dramatic transformations of literary form. An opening section engages with the broad question of how the geographical and political positioning of experimental writing informs its contribution to racial discourses, while late segments focus on central critical domains within this field: race and performativity, race and the contemporary nation, and post racial futures, With essays on a whole race of contemporary writers, this volume makes an important contribution to our understanding of the politics and aesthetics of contemporary writing.

Same old, same old: Zadie Smith's 'White teeth' and Monica Ali's 'Brick Lane'

Close examination of White Teeth and Brick Lane illustrates why postcolonial frameworks continue to be relevant when discussing “black British literature”. To differing degrees, both these novels maintain postcolonial contexts in their representation of British‐born black and Asian individuals, even as they express the confidence of this new generation. This paper addresses how the tensions between British‐born confidence and familiar tropes of migrant alienation may call into question readings of these novels that emphasize their uniqueness and positivity.

Mobilising representations : dialogues, embodiment and power

In April 2013, Meteoros, a new sculpture by Lucy and Jorge Orta, was unveiled hanging from the roof of St Pancras station in London (Figure 1.1). As Jonathan Jones, a Guardian journalist wrote, Lift up your eyes — it floats high above the concourses of the reborn Victorian railway station, a baroque vision of the heavens hung under the modern glass roof that has brought this gothic structure back to life.

Iris Murdoch, Ian McEwan and the Place of the Political in Contemporary Fiction

Since the bombing of the Twin Towers in New York on 9/11, contemporary writers have been increasingly drawn into public debate about the relationship between literature and politics. Ian McEwan has become the most prolific of a number of British writers who appear to support the re-emergence of the author as public intellectual. McEwan’s fiction bears comparison with Iris Murdoch’s in the sense that an ethical perspective already evident in his writing has become increasingly pronounced in his most recent fiction. This similarity, added to the fact that Murdoch also spoke powerfully on public issues, offers the opportunity to consider the relationship between the ethical and the political in the work of two writers with similar literary and political drives.1 This essay explores the strategies each writer develops when pressing political issues demand that they combine the role of the artist with that of public intellectual. It suggests that Murdoch’s writing has much to offer contemporary writers faced with influential demands for public accountability.