Imagining London : postcolonial fiction and the transnational Metropolis / John Clement Ball.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Imagining London examines representations of the English metropolis in Canadian, West Indian, South Asian, and second-generation 'black British' novels written in the last half of the twentieth century.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Ball (Univ. of New Brunswick, Canada) has written a complex study of numerous novelistic and some filmic representations of experience imaginatively situated in London by postcolonial authors who encountered the city in the decades after 1950. These works are racially diverse and drawn from former territories of the British Commonwealth, e.g., Canada, the Caribbean, and South Asia. Kate Pullinger, Mordecai Richler, Sam Selvon, George Lamming, V.S. Naipaul, Amitav Ghosh, and Kamala Markandaya are among the many scrutinized in this crowded book. Ball sees London as a rapidly changing contact zone, or cultural interface, for writers. As with the best postcolonial theory, the emphasis here is on reciprocity, mutuality, and interaction between the postcolonial writers and the metropolis of the former colonial masters. Though these relations do not take place under conditions of equality, Ball believes that the resulting works envisage postcolonialism as "an ongoing process of anticipating and striving for truly decolonized future realities." He rightly stresses that London has become a transnational city settled by many diasporas, so that postcolonial writers encounter in it not just the local London but also the networks that connect it to the global. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Extensive undergraduate collections and all research libraries. K. Tololyan Wesleyan University