Identity Construction in Andrea Levy's "Fruit of the Lemon"

Identity Construction in Andrea Levy's Author: Bettina Siebert
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3668888965
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 27

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Rostock (Anglistik/ Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: Andrea Levy’s novel "Fruit of the Lemon" confronts issues of migration, racism, belonging, and identification in Britain by following the coming-of-age of a young British woman with Afro-Caribbean roots. Issues concerning identity formation are at the centre of the term paper. The backgrounds of individual and cultural identity formation are reviewed critically focusing on theories by Stuart Hall and others. Identity is understood to be a construct that is changeable and situational thus becoming fluent in response to varying social situations. Conflicts of identity arise within individual identity through the friction between self-understanding and public representation. The paper proposes that the main character and narrator of the story experiences processes of identity formation which enable her to find her place in British society and confront racism. This identity formation is triggered by conflicts created by racist confrontations that lead to the destabilization of the character. The protagonist’s (re)discovery of her ancestral cultural heritage provide her with a base for forming a multi-facetted identity which enhances her self-understanding and self-esteem.

Fruit of the Lemon

Fruit of the Lemon PDF Author: Andrea Levy
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429912340
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
From the award-winning author of Small Island, “a bittersweet exploration of an outsider’s experience of British culture” (Bookmarks). Faith Jackson knows little about her parents’ lives before they moved to England. Happy to be starting her first job in the costume department at BBC television, and to be sharing a house with friends, Faith is full of hope and expectation. But when her parents announce that they are moving “home” to Jamaica, Faith’s fragile sense of her identity is threatened. Angry and perplexed as to why her parents would move to a country they so rarely mention, Faith becomes increasingly aware of the covert and public racism of her daily life, at home and at work. At her parents’ suggestion, in the hope it will help her to understand where she comes from, Faith goes to Jamaica for the first time. There she meets her Aunt Coral, whose storytelling provides Faith with ancestors, whose lives reach from Cuba and Panama to Harlem and Scotland. Branch by branch, story by story, Faith scales the family tree, and discovers her own vibrant heritage, which is far richer and wilder than she could have imagined. “Levy has chosen her title shrewdly: like the lemon, her loaded satire is bright and alluring, but its bite is sharp.” —Booklist “Levy’s raw sense of realism and depth of feeling infuses every line.” —Elle “Bright and inventive . . . Levy’s command of voices, whether English or Jamaican, is fine, fresh and funny.” —The Observer

Growing Up Transnational

Growing Up Transnational PDF Author: May Friedman
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442642971
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Redefining self. Transnational Rio de Janeiro : (Re)visiting geographical experiences / Alan P. Marcus ; When Russia came to stay / Lea Povozhaev ; "Neither the end of the world nor the beginning" : transnational identity politics in Lisa Suhair Majaj's self-writing / Silvia Schultermandl ; Identity and belonging among second-generation Greek and Italian Canadian women / Noula Papayiannis ; Time and space in the life of Pierre S. Weiss : autoethnographic engagements with memory and trans/dis/location / Samuel Veissière -- Redefining nation. Contemporary Croatian film and the new social economy / Jelena Šesnić ; Identity, bodies, and second-generation returnees in West Africa / Erin Kenny ; What is an autobiographical author :becoming the other / Julian Vigo ; Transnational identity mappings in Andrea Levy's fiction / Șebnem Toplu -- Redefining family. The personal, the political, and the complexity of identity : some thoughts on mothering / May Friedman ; Mothers on the move : experiences of Indonesian women migrant workers / Theresa W. Devasahayam and Noor Abdul Rahman ; From Changowitz to Bailey Wong : mixed heritage and transnational families in Gish Jen's fiction / Lan Dong ; Tug of war : the gender dynamics of parenting in a bi/transnational family / Katrin Krǐz and Uday Manandhar.

Doing Family in Second-Generation British Migration Literature

Doing Family in Second-Generation British Migration Literature PDF Author: Corinna Assmann
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110605082
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Due to the large-scale global transformations of the 20th century, migration literature has become a vibrant genre over the last decades. In these novels, issues of transcultural identity and belonging naturally feature prominently. This study takes a closer look at the ways in which the idea of family informs processes of identity construction. It explores changing roles and meanings of the diasporic family as well as intergenerational family relations in a migration setting in order to identify the specific challenges, problems, and possibilities that arise in this context. This book builds on insights from different fields of family research (e.g. sociology, psychology, communication studies, memory studies) to provide a conceptual framework for the investigation of synchronic and diachronic family constellations and connections. The approach developed in this study not only sheds new light on contemporary British migration literature but can also prove fruitful for analyses of families in literature more generally. By highlighting the relevance and multifaceted nature of doing family, this study also offers new perspectives for transcultural memory studies.

Politics and Poetics of Belonging

Politics and Poetics of Belonging PDF Author: Mounir Guirat
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527509745
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
The contributions gathered in this volume bear witness to the fact that belonging is a multi-faceted concept that necessitates different and shifting idioms of expression. It continually requires reconsideration and redefinition of our affiliations in response to the rapid social, cultural, and political changes of our world. The literary paradigms, linguistic practices, and cultural formations of belonging testify to the impossibility of confining it to conventional and established structures of knowledge. The different reflections on belonging introduced in this book are instrumental in reassessing and remodelling the general assumptions that have informed its definition and representation. The current global reality and the self-other encounter make inevitable the continuous search for new forms of belonging that are in tune with one’s evolving and changing sense of self. Theoretically informed by and substantially grounded in lively and heated debates on cultural identity and belonging, this book proposes new critical directions in understanding national and transnational belonging.

Never Far From Nowhere

Never Far From Nowhere PDF Author: Andrea Levy
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0755372980
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
A passionate and perceptive story full of the pain and the humour of growing up, from Andrea Levy, author of the Orange Prize winning SMALL ISLAND and the Man Booker shortlisted THE LONG SONG. NEVER FAR FROM NOWHERE is the story of two sisters, Olive and Vivien, born in London to Jamaican parents and brought up on a council estate. They go to the same grammar school, but while Vivien's life becomes a chaotic mix of friendships, youth clubs, skinhead violence, A-levels, discos and college, Olive, three years older and a skin shade darker, has a very different tale to tell...

Becoming Black

Becoming Black PDF Author: Michelle M. Wright
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822385864
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Becoming Black is a powerful theorization of Black subjectivity throughout the African diaspora. In this unique comparative study, Michelle M. Wright discusses the commonalties and differences in how Black writers and thinkers from the United States, the Caribbean, Africa, France, Great Britain, and Germany have responded to white European and American claims about Black consciousness. As Wright traces more than a century of debate on Black subjectivity between intellectuals of African descent and white philosophers, she also highlights how feminist writers have challenged patriarchal theories of Black identity. Wright argues that three nineteenth-century American and European works addressing race—Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, G. W. F. Hegel’s Philosophy of History, and Count Arthur de Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races—were particularly influential in shaping twentieth-century ideas about Black subjectivity. She considers these treatises in depth and describes how the revolutionary Black thinkers W. E. B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Frantz Fanon countered the theories they promulgated. She explains that while Du Bois, Césaire, Senghor, and Fanon rejected the racist ideologies of Jefferson, Hegel, and Gobineau, for the most part they did so within what remained a nationalist, patriarchal framework. Such persistent nationalist and sexist ideologies were later subverted, Wright shows, in the work of Black women writers including Carolyn Rodgers and Audre Lorde and, more recently, the British novelists Joan Riley, Naomi King, Jo Hodges, and Andrea Levy. By considering diasporic writing ranging from Du Bois to Lorde to the contemporary African novelists Simon Njami and Daniel Biyaoula, Wright reveals Black subjectivity as rich, varied, and always evolving.

Ritual and Narrative

Ritual and Narrative PDF Author: Vera Nünning
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839425328
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Ritual and narrative are pivotal means of human meaning-making and of ordering experience, but the close interrelationship between them has not as yet been given the attention it deserves. How can models and categories from narrative theory benefit the study of ritual, and what can we gain from concepts of ritual studies in analysing narrative? This book brings together a wide range of disciplinary perspectives including literary studies, archaeology, biblical and religious studies, and political science. It presents theoretical explorations as well as in-depth case studies of ritual and narrative in different media and historical contexts.

Settling Down and Settling Up

Settling Down and Settling Up PDF Author: Andrea Katherine Medovarski
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442640375
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description


A History of Food in Literature

A History of Food in Literature PDF Author: Charlotte Boyce
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1135022070
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
When novels, plays and poems refer to food, they are often doing much more than we might think. Recent critical thinking suggests that depictions of food in literary works can help to explain the complex relationship between the body, subjectivity and social structures. A History of Food in Literature provides a clear and comprehensive overview of significant episodes of food and its consumption in major canonical literary works from the medieval period to the twenty-first century. This volume contextualises these works with reference to pertinent historical and cultural materials such as cookery books, diaries and guides to good health, in order to engage with the critical debate on food and literature and how ideas of food have developed over the centuries. Organised chronologically and examining certain key writers from every period, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens, this book's enlightening critical analysis makes it relevant for anyone interested in the study of food and literature.