One of the defining elements of British mentality is, arguably, the country’s exclusionism. Over the centuries, the island nation has displayed a noticeable tendency to be wary of those coming to its shores in hopes of a better future – particularly if said newcomers are non-white, culturally non-Western, and/or deemed ‘undesirable’. In this seminar, we will attempt to trace and critically assess various representations of immigrant experiences in contemporary British fiction and on film. Starting with Matthew Brown’s The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015), a biopic about the intercultural challenges faced by a mathematician from colonial India in England during World War I, this course will explore different key moments in 20th-and 21st-century British (post-)colonial history in a diachronic perspective. In addition to Brown’s film, we will read Andrea Levy’s novel Small Island (2004), delving into the history of the Caribbean diaspora in Britain in the context of the 1948 Windrush Generation. Following that, we will analyse the portrayal of hybrid cultural and non-normative gender identities in Gurinder Chadha’s sports comedy Bend It Like Beckham (2002). And as a final step, we shall examine John Lanchester’s dystopian novel The Wall (2019), which imagines a future in which British isolationist, anti-immigrant policies have reached their dangerous peak.
Taking into account the historical and contemporary socio-political contexts that have shaped these narratives, this seminar aims to deepen students’ understanding of key concepts of cultural and literary theory. How do these novels and films navigate questions of home and belonging, of the (re-)construction of cultural and personal identity, of prejudice and Western cultural hegemony? How do they address ideas of nationality and nationhood, how do they (de-)construct the binary of Self and Other? While further familiarising students with the methodological tools of film and novel analysis, this course tries to offer a critical perspective on British immigration that ventures beyond the binary opposition between a Blairite utopia of multiculturalism and the irrational imagery of nationalist fearmongering prevalent in anti-immigrant discourse today.
Please purchase a hard copy of the following two novels:
Lanchester, John. The Wall. Faber & Faber, 2019.
Levy, Andrea. Small Island. Headline, 2004.
- Dozent/in: Nadine Schmidt