Post-heritage narratives: Migrancy and travelling theory in V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival and Andrea Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon

Abstract

This paper argues that V.S. Naipaul and Andrea Levy revise migrancy as a literary intervention into contemporary British discourses of cultural heritage and patriotism. Official, state-sponsored constructions of heritage and patriotism are closely intertwined to form an insular British national identity. In Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival (1987) and Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon (1998), migrancy not only denotes the deterritorialization and displacement of people but also the travel and transformation of ideas, or what Edward Said calls travelling theory. The concept of migrancy itself travels in the journeys undertaken by the narrators of these two novels. It gains a critical force that contests the insularity of British heritage discourse while also affirming the intersecting and ineluctable presence of people of colour from Britain’s former colonies in the history and cultural make-up of Britain itself.