Entangled peripheries: Spatial agency in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet and Caryl Phillips’s The Lost Child

Abstract

ABSTRACT With the increase in global mobility, notions of centre and periphery are becoming more unstable. Urban centres of colonial significance lose their importance as diasporic literature in general, and Black British literature in particular, explores liminal spatial perspectives within the diasporic experience. Two contemporary Black British novels, Jackie Kay’s Trumpet (1998) and Caryl Phillips’s The Lost Child (2015), imagine British peripheries as spaces of personal and cultural significance. The periphery is analysed here as a material presence in the novels and considered as a locale that is multiple at its core. Revealing European peripheries as entangled in a complex web of historical and cultural implications, these Black British fictions shed light on peripheral spaces from a non-dominant European perspective and demonstrate a shift in understanding the periphery not only as an opposition to the centre, but as a locus for the negotiation of postcolonial life in Britain.