Andrea Levy, in Memoriam ed. by Henghameh Saroukhani, Sarah Lawson Welsh, and Michael Perfect

Abstract

Reviewed by: Andrea Levy, in Memoriam ed. by Henghameh Saroukhani, Sarah Lawson Welsh, and Michael Perfect Corrine Collins ANDREA LEVY, IN MEMORIAM, edited by Henghameh Saroukhani, Sarah Lawson Welsh, and Michael Perfect. A special issue of ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 53, No. 1–2, 2022. 330 pp. This special issue of ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature commemorates the life and work of Black British writer Andrea Levy and is the inaugural issue of what editors call “Levy studies” (p. 11). Henghameh Saroukhani, Sarah Lawson Welsh, and Michael Perfect dedicate the issue and Levy studies to the “significance of [Levy’s] aesthetic and political legacy” (p. 9). The editors state that their desired focus for subsequent scholarship is to take more seriously Levy’s transnational and outer-national significance, and they selected the Canadian journal ARIEL to highlight the ways Levy’s work is also connected to places outside of the Caribbean that have been shaped by the British empire (p. 11). While Levy’s work has become increasingly prominent and celebrated in Britain, marked by not only the popularity of her novels but also their adaptations for screen and theater, the editors are invested in critiques and analyses that also challenge the ways her work has been taken up. The special issue [End Page 178] is a blueprint for the kinds of scholarship the editors hope will occupy the space of Levy studies, and it includes a range of contributions that examine Levy’s multimodal work. The issue includes scholarly critiques, essays on pedagogy, reflections on Levy’s life, and previously unpublished works, all grounded in the study of Levy as a writer invested in the violent entanglements of empire. In the foreword, Black British presenter and journalist Gary Younge recalls a conversation he had with Levy about the importance of place. Levy frequently wrote about North London and the places and cultures that influence it and Britain; her work is invested in the Caribbean as a firm, central, and important part of British history through legacies of colonization, enslavement, and migration. Despite the geographic terrain that Levy’s work traverses, she herself lived all her life in North London. During their conversation, Younge suggested that writers who stay in place are burdened with insularity, to which Levy challenged, “What is so inherently great about moving around and living in different places?” (p. 1). Younge concludes that Levy’s relationship to place should cause us all to rethink the ways that places are connected across time and space, and the special issue urges readers to take the transnational nature of Levy’s work more seriously than ever before. Levy’s transnational approach threads through the issue, providing the context for her later work on television and many of the scholarly essays included in the collection. Challenging Britain’s narrative of empire is central to Levy studies, and in “July’s People: Adoption and Kinship in Andrea Levy’s Fiction,” John McLeod argues that Levy’s work is continually engaged in the genealogical work of empire, in particular understanding its impact on private and public institutions. The editors advocate a renewed focus on Levy’s resistance to narratives of transformation to assert that her work is polemical, even as it has been used in the British national imaginary to create a sense of national identity and belonging. Fiona Tolan and Vedrana Veličković read some of Levy’s novels as narratives of imperial and post-colonial melancholia and argue that these novels do not present hopes for a racially and culturally integrated Britain but rather a Britain that should remain under scrutiny for its treatment of British Caribbean subjects, a key point that is overlooked in mainstream uptakes of Levy’s work. Deirdre Osborne makes similar observations in “Sites and Sightlines: Staging Andrea Levy’s Small Island,” which examines the cross-genre interplay between the novel Small Island (2004), its adaptation for theater, and Levy’s self-narrated audiobook. These essays examine the ways that Levy is taken up and understood by British audiences and builds on previous scholarship on Levy’s public reception as a Black writer, challenging her reputation as someone who is not...