Voyage Out, Voyage Up
Subjectivities of post-migration and cruel optimism in the (un)making of the Black-British Bildungsroman
Datos Bibliográficos
| ID | 2174302 |
|---|---|
| Autores | Katrin Becker (0000-0003-2375-1459, University of Siegen, autor de correspondencia) |
| Año | 2024 |
| Volumen | 27 |
| Número | 3 |
| Páginas | 1-18 |
| Fecha de publicación | 2024-01-08 |
| Peer Reviewed | Sí |
| Open Access | No |
| Tipo | ARTICLE |
| Revista | Interventions (JOURNAL) |
| Identificadores de la revista | ISSN: 1369-801X • E-ISSN: 1469-929X |
| Editorial | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/1369801x.2023.2290561 |
| OpenAlex | W4390667163 |
| Idioma | EN |
| Referencias citadas | 43 |
In studies of the Black-British Bildungsroman, “race” and/or gender tend to take the front seat, even if class rarely goes unmentioned as yet another obstacle in the narrated formation of upwardly mobile subjectivities of post-migration. However, there is no critical consensus about the political and affective concerns that drive these appropriations of the Bildungsroman genre for imagining post-migrant experiences of (de)marginalisation. While Mark Stein has influentially emphasised the symbolic agency represented in and exerted by such “novels of transformation”, others have noted the ambiguities that resonate in narratives of post-migrant upward mobility. Intervening in this debate with a sustained focus on class, I reread two texts rarely discussed in these generic terms – Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) and NW (2012) – against the backdrop of neoliberal meritocracy and its cruel optimism. Both novels stage post-migrant achievement against all intersectional odds in politically conflicted and literarily productive ways that challenge the good-life fantasy of upward mobility conventionalised in the Black-British Bildungsroman as a demarginalising, socially transformative genre. I argue that Smith’s novels unmake the cruel optimism of post-migrant success stories by remaking the Bildungsroman as most contradictory of modern symbolic forms
Aesthetics · Art · Fantasy · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Rhetoric · Sociology · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Gender Studies · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics
The way of the world
Cruel Optimism
Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects
Problems and Perspectives of a Theory of Transformational Processes of Bildung
The Black Jacobins
Postcolonialism
British Asian fiction
Unworking community
Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers
The politics of everyday hybridity
Extra dimensions, new routines
Black London
The mouseness of the mouse
The Multicultural Bildungsroman
Trailing Postmodernism
Doing Family in Second-Generation British Migration Literature
Unity in Diversity Revisited? British Literature and Culture in the 1990s
Critical Perspectives on Sam Selvon
Phantom Formations
Against Meritocracy
Social Space and Symbolic Power
The politics of literary postcoloniality
A New Model of Social Class? Findings from the BBC's Great British Class Survey Experiment
British Islam and the novel of transformation
Melancholic travellers and the idea of (un)belonging in Bernardine Evaristo's Lara and Soul Tourists
| Velocidad de citación | historical |
|---|---|
| Altamente citado | No |