Retrieving Forgotten Histories, Challenging White Britishness: the Work of Andrea Levy

The aim of this thesis is to discuss the work by Black British writer Andrea Levy. Her five novels are analysed in their progression towards a serious questioning of the idea of national identity and of the whiteness that has long been attached to the concept of Britishness. Moreover, it will be commented how her fiction also strives to unearth forgotten histories and to give a voice to those who have been made silent or side-lined by dominant discourse. The thesis also provides a summary of features of postcolonial literatures that can be helpful in examining Levy's oeuvre and presents salient moments of the history of post-war Black Britain and the cultural achievements of its writers. London-born Levy, as the daughter of †˜Windrush' migrants who moved from Jamaica to Britain in the post-war years, belongs to what has been termed the †˜second-generation'. Her early fiction from the 1990s started to retrieve the invisible lives of second-generation black British girls, whose right of belonging is constantly questioned. Her later historical novels reveal the deep and inextricable links that connect the †˜mother country' to its West Indian colonies by focusing on two significant moments for black history: the period of mass migration from the Caribbean to Britain after the Second World War and the last days of slavery in nineteenth century Jamaica. The period of slavery, the colonial subjects' efforts during the World Wars and their contribution to the reconstruction of war-ravaged Britain have long been obscured or erased by official historiography. Two main motives have been identified in her work. The first is the effort to recover these forgotten histories and make the invisible seen. The second theme is a progressive challenging of the hegemonic construction of an exclusively white Britishness. Levy, like other Black British writers, deconstructs and transforms the traditional notions of Britishness and Otherness and puts forward a more inclusive concept of national identity that can accommodate the immense hybridity of the inhabitants of the postcolonial metropolis. Through the articulation of silenced black voices and the retrieval of their largely unknown history, Levy advocates their right of belonging. The thesis also comments a series of intertextual references both to other postcolonial or †˜Black' texts and to canonical British works. Moreover, special attention is given to linguistic choices (such as the employment of Patois), the hybridity of diaspora identities, racist violence and gender issues.