Original scientific paper

https://doi.org/10.15291/sic/1.14.lc.2

“I am the bastard child of the Empire”: Women and Hybrid Identity in Andrea Levy’s Fiction

Vesna Ukić Košta

Abstract

In the novels published in the course of the nineties, Every Light in the House Burnin’ (1994), Never Far from Nowhere (1996), and Fruit of the Lemon (1999), Andrea Levy (1956–2019), a British writer of Jamaican origin, focuses on the experiences of British-born daughters of first-generation Caribbean immigrants in Britain. This paper will examine how Levy’s young protagonists struggle to come to terms with their highly hybridized identities, which resist reductive racial categories of ‘white’ and ‘black.’ Experiencing racial bias on the one hand and confronting silences about their Jamaican heritage on the other, Levy’s protagonists often find themselves in liminal spaces and are constantly compelled to negotiate private (Jamaican) and more public (British) spheres of existence.

Keywords

Andrea Levy, Stuart Hall, womanhood, British, hybridity, identity

Hrčak ID:

312848

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/312848

Publication date:

21.12.2023.

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