New Paths in Black British Literature. Global Trajectories towards "Home"

My PhD thesis New Paths in Black British Literature. Global Trajectories towards “Home” deals with the current shift of the traditional concepts of “home” and “migration” towards the notions of “homecoming” and “reverse migration” in Black British literature. Indeed, the evolution of postcolonial studies and the recent development of a transnational approach in literary studies (Jay 2010) have led to a renewed interest towards the subaltern voices, especially in relation to the phenomena of migration and diaspora as they have been depicted by Black British authors. Starting from Gayatri Spivak’s assertion that “Today the ‘subaltern’ must be rethought” (Spivak 2000), the aim of my PhD thesis is to reconsider the image of “subaltern people” in Black British literature through the investigation of the effects of globalization on the literary and personal experiences of Caribbean and South Asian migrants of first and second generation. In particular, my focus will be on the phenomenon of “return migration”, according to which diasporic subjects decide to leave the UK and come back to their ancestral homelands. From this perspective, I will analyse the different narrative devices used by those postcolonial authors who have depicted stories of return of the first generation – V. S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon, Dennis Ferdinand, Caryl Phillips, Kiran Desai, Shoba Narayan, Amit Chaudhuri, and Nadeem Aslam – as well as the more recent accounts of Tariq Mehmood, Andrea Levy, Atima Srivastava, and Hardeep Kohli for the second generation. I will focus on some precise topics: migrants’ communal search for a community of belonging in both the adoptive and the original country; their relationship with the new notions of space and place, as well as with the new global metropolises; and the reconfiguration of the concepts of home and homeland, with the resulting desire of homecoming. These topics will be approached through a trans-disciplinary methodology which includes a series of discursive formations, such as Migration and Diaspora Studies, and Global Studies. Starting from this theoretical perspective, I will consider how Europe has been “provincialized” (Chakrabarty 2000) in Black British works - also in relation to the recent sociological shifts - by focusing on the migrants’ desire to return home, and finally suggesting a new tendency, according to which migrant flows are reversing towards East. In this light, I will propose the definition of “reverse migration” to indicate English people who decide to migrate to the former British colonies, especially to India. The theorization of this new tendency will be supported by the analysis of some novels which reveal the “reversed” migration’s stories of their white British characters.