Lonely Londoners Research Articles

The Reciprocal Relationship Between the City and its Subjects in Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For

This article seeks to examine the significance of geographical setting in Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (2006 [1956]) and Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For (2005) in order to understand the undeniable reciprocal relationship that exists between the city and its subjects. Hence, I will analyse the role played by London and Toronto in the construction and development of their inhabitants’ identities, as well as the power that city dwellers have in (re)shaping urban spaces. The article aims to examine the dynamic and fluid character of the city and intends to identify the effects that migrant communities have on rewriting and remapping urban spaces when exercising their agency.

The Analysis of “Hybridity” in The Lonely Londoners from the Perspective of Postcolonial Theory

This article gives an analysis of “hybridity” in Samuel Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners from the perspective of postcolonial theory, which depicts the lives of West Indian immigrants in post-World War II in London, as well as their negotiation of identities within a new cultural landscape. The “hybridity” discussed in this paper includes linguistic hybridity, naming hybridity, culinary hybridity, and hybridity in spaces. These multidimensional features of “hybridity” reveal the wisdom and strategies that characters demonstrate in the process of constructing identity and seeking a sense of belonging. Drawing on postcolonial theories of hybridity, this thesis analyzes how characters adeptly employ strategies of “hybridity” to negotiate identity and regain a sense of belonging, thus presenting the diversity of belonging and subjectivity in the postcolonial context through characters’ exploration and negotiation of hybrid identities.

Diaspora, Modernism, and Black Masculinities in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and Andrew Salkey’s Escape to an Autumn Pavement

Following the transnational turn in modernist studies, and building on Stuart Hall’s and Nadia Ellis’s concepts of diaspora as key to understanding Caribbean modernism, this essay examines Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Andrew Salkey’s Escape to an Autumn Pavement (1960) as the first wave of West Indian fiction that traces a black, male consciousness shaped by modernity and migration, one whose lived experiences and feelings of belonging in post-WWII London resist binarized understandings of colonizer and colonized. Selvon’s and Salkey’s fiction represents complex and conflicting senses of black masculinity as mediated by colonialism, bourgeois respectability, and whiteness. Migrant or middle-class, normative or queer, the various modes of black masculinity captured in the novels counter reductive attempts to ascribe one fixed identity, ideological position, or reality to Windrush flaneurs who might prefer walking the streets of London incognito.

Elusive mother country: The literature of the Indian-Caribbean Windrush

The recent commemorations in 2018 and 2023, of the 70th and 75th anniversary of the arrival of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks, have prompted a deeper engagement with the history of post-war migration from the Caribbean to the ‘motherland’. As public awareness of the economic contribution the Windrush Generation (1948–1971) made to Britain grows, there is also an increasing curiosity in the artistic output of this community and their descendants. However, when museums and cultural institutions choose to engage with the history of the Windrush Generation and its influence, such representations focus on Black Britain and a celebration of the African-Caribbean presence; little or no acknowledgment is given to the community of Indian-Caribbean heritage, who also formed part of the Windrush Generation. Frequently for example, art exhibitions, book lists and musical celebrations ignore the Indian-Caribbean presence with the UK’s Guardian newspaper recently publishing an article entitled ‘Windrush at 75: books that shaped the black British experience’ (author’s italics).In this article I seek to analyze the literary contribution made by writers of Indian-Caribbean heritage, who were part of the Windrush Generation. From Sam Selvon, the author of the classic Windrush novel The Lonely Londoners to lesser-known writers such as Lakshmi Persaud and Elly Niland, I argue that Indian-Caribbean writers have complicated the binaries of the current Windrush narrative and have perhaps been afforded less consideration as a result. My aim in this article is to offer a preliminary analysis of the literary odyssey of Indian-Caribbean writers during this period

A Comparative Analysis of The Lonely Londoners and Wide Sargasso Sea within the Context of Multiculturalism

A Comparative Analysis of The Lonely Londoners and Wide Sargasso Sea within the Context of Multiculturalism

The Production of Space in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners: A Lefebvrean Reading

First published in 1956, Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners explores the experiences of West Indian immigrants in London, following the end of World War II. Written by a migrant novelist, who came to London in 1950, the story fictionalises the immigrants’ experiences and their struggles in the imperial centre of London. While the primary concern of the novel concentrates on the themes of identity, migration, and the politics of representation, it also deals with the production of space through the decisions made by the urban planners and designers, social movements and relations as well as the daily practices of the individual citizens. Sociologist Henri Lefebvre emphasises the significance of everyday life and the lived experiences of the individuals to analyse the process of how space is produced. Lefebvre’s reading of space as a social product challenges any reading of space as neutral and static. In other words, according to Lefebvre, space is not just a mere geographical or territorial notion, rather a living organism which goes through a production process and changes over time. Therefore, it is the aim of this paper to analyse how space is conceived, perceived, and lived in, and as a result, how it is produced and reproduced in Sam Selvon’s classic novel, The Lonely Londoners.

Shades of Diasporic Experiences in London: A Reading of Samuel Selvon’s the Lonely Londoners and Buchi Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen

In recent times, given the rising spate of economic crunch bedeviling many African states, there has been a surge in migration to developed countries like the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, etc. Often, the migrants travel out with lofty expectations about these foreign lands but get disappointed and end up doing debasing jobs just to survive. Many scholars have engaged diasporic experiences as an evolving concept in postcolonial literature but there is yet more room for exploration especially in the Nigerian context where the ‘japa’ syndrome seems to be gaining frightening momentum. Thus, this paper, adopts a postcolonial theoretical framework in examining the dimensions of diasporic experiences portrayed in Samuel Selvon’s the Lonely Londoners and Buchi Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen. Selvon and Emecheta, in their novel, portray the dreams, aspirations, and expectations of immigrants as well as the dynamic experiences that completely alter their lives. The study, therefore, in the examination of the primary texts, highlights the myriads of problems encountered by immigrants in the novels; some of them include climate change, racism, accommodation, employment, taxation, the high cost of living, and discrimination. The essay concludes that foreign climes like London are not beds of roses and shows that immigrants are sometimes, subjected to conditions that may be worse than their experiences in their home countries. The paper recommends that the British government and indeed nations that have attained the status of developed countries, intensify efforts to reduce the plethora of problems encountered by immigrants living in the United Kingdom.

Between Transgression and Conviviality: Everyday Urban Space and the Carnivalesque Strategies in The Lonely Londoners

This article examines how the everyday space of postwar London in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners is reimagined by Caribbean migrants, whose resilience generates comedy and the spirit of the carnival. I argue that Selvon uses his depictions of the city to show his Black Londoners at play as culturally assertive and sexually eccentric types who counter the adversity in the host society. While discussing how the novel’s portrayal of the carnivalesque allows for the expression of immigrant agency, I stress the convivial nature of sex and comedy as a central model of their cultural negotiation.

Hypercanonical Joyce: Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, creative disaffiliation, and the global afterlives of Ulysses

ABSTRACT Roughly two-thirds of the way through Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956), there is a section highly redolent of the ‘Penelope’ episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Commonly referred to as ‘Summer’, the section’s similarity to ‘Penelope’ has not gone unnoticed among either Joyce or Selvon scholars; to date, however, only J. Dillon Brown (2013) has offered a substantive reading of the connection. This article seizes on the relative absence of critical discussion of Selvon in Joyce studies to consider what might be the particular responsibilities that Joyce studies bears when reading Joyce’s global afterlives. Drawing on critical debates around the concept of global modernism, I discuss the terms of Joyce’s canonisation and his use in ‘diffusionist’ models of literary history. Building on Kandice Chuh’s (2019) analysis of the combined effects of liberal representational politics and hypercanonicity in literary studies, I contend that future studies of Joyce’s global reception and influence should seek to establish mutually transformative intercultural dialogue, which in turn requires opening the field to unsettling Joyce’s position in literary studies – and, to that I end, I propose that Selvon’s novel provides an exemplary model of engagement with Joyce through ‘creative disaffiliation’.

Representation as Collective Memory Carnivalesque and Orality in Eldorado West One by Sam Selvon

In Sam Selvon’s seven one-act radio-drama Eldorado West One, written for BBC radio in 1969, a universe of colours, contrasts, accents, nostalgia, and struggle that peculiarise the lifeexperience of the Caribbean community in Londonis atstake. The main characters ofthe play are the same as in the well-known novel The Lonely Londoners(1956), re-represented in a theatrical context, constructed on the orality and urban communication, reinvented through the immediate representation of radioactors and the expression of the Trinidadian Creole Language. The surrounding reality described by Selvon's conscious disillusionment is interwoven with the historical events that have marked British society, such as the massive migration fromthe Caribbean territories to London, like the Windrush generation in the 50s, that, in the last decades, have shaped the United Kingdom intoa cross-cultural society. This essay is an attempt to show, from a linguistic reflection to ethnographic data about Trinidadian Carnival, how we incur in these elements through the play indicated above;through the connection in Selvon’s narrative between the Caribbean heritage, in particular the manifestation of the subculture related to the Trinidadian Carnival, theCreole andCalypso music;and the syncretism created by the tradition and the contact with the Western culture, in the era of European decolonisation during the 20thcentury.

Dialect, Class struggle and Immigration in The Lonely Londoners, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Room At the Top

This paper addresses a little piece of a lot more extensive undertaking looking at the connections between working class and migrant writing which will frame a piece of my thesis. I will discuss the employments of lingo, class struggle and interesting differences in these books from the 1950s – John Braine’s Room At the Top (1957), Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956). I’ll begin with reference to a novel from the very period that maintains a strategic distance from broad utilization of tongue, prior to going to how these creators use vernacular and standard English alongside one another, just as set against one another, prior to getting done with an endeavor to historicize their employments of lingo. English the most prevalent language of the world has evolved with times influenced by German about 30%, Latin 30%, French 25%, Greek 5% and other languages about 10%. Surprisingly London alone has 300 other different languages spoken and they all influence add to the further development of Lingo and communication.

The translation of images and West Indian creole into Spanish in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners

Abstract Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners is considered a classic of West Indian literature in the style of Migrant Modernism (Brown 2013). First published in post-war London in 1956, it was not translated into Spanish until 2016, probably due to the challenging features of the novel and its language. A case of text creolisation (Buzelin 2000), the translation of the novel required an active effort to construct a language variant that could convey Selvon’s peculiar literary style and sociopolitical intent. The present work aims to investigate the images of West Indians portrayed in the original novel and, more specifically, how they are transposed into the Spanish text. The research method includes an account of the editorial process, an interview with the translator, and an analysis of the paratexts and translation excerpts. Finally, the reception of the translation in literary reviews shall also be discussed.

Colored Subjectivities: Self, Mind, and Body in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners

پژوهش حاضر به بررسی مفهوم فردیت در رمان لندنی‌های غریب اثر سم سلوون می‌پردازد. برای این منظور، شخصیت‌های کلیدی این رمان که اغلب سیاه ‌پوستان مهاجر هستند، از منظر خویشتن، ذهن، و جسم بررسی خواهند شد. بحث اصلی این مقاله بر ریشه یابی رفتار سردرگم و اغلب ناکارآمد شخصیت‌های سیاه ‌پوست داستان استوار است. با در نظر گرفتن این نکته، ریشه های بروز تحقیر نفس و خویشتن دو‌تکه در سیاه ‌پوستان این رمان با ترکیب مفهوم درونی‌شدن تحقیر فرانتس فانون و ماخولیای فروید به بحث گذاشته می‌شود. برای نیل به این هدف، این تحقیق بر ذهن ناهشیار مردان سیاه‌ پوست تمرکز می‌کند تا علل تجربه ناموفق‌شان از زندگی در کلان‌‌شهر سفید لندن را آشکار سازد. با توجه به نتایج به دست آمده از این پژوهش می‌توان گفت شخصیت‌پردازی‌های سلوون کمک چندانی به اهداف استعمارستیزانه او نمی‌کند و تا حد زیادی در تضاد با ویژگی‌های بارز ضد‌استعماری رمان او قرار می‌گیرد.

The Value of Intertextuality in Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and Naipaul’s The Mimic Men

Studies on comparative literature have been fragmentary concentrating on one or two aspects of the thematic concerns of novels without emphasizing the concepts of divergent and convergent intertextuality. This paper aims to revisit Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners re-reading it in dialogue with Naipaul’s novel The Mimic Men. The selected novels are controversial. Criticism deployed on all fronts conveys the pluralities and oppositions that are in fact the novels’ hallmarks. Yet, the aspects criticized attest to, and confirm, the authors’ taking of the less trodden track. The comparative analysis within the scope of this paper will show that Naipaul’s and Selvon’s fictional representations of creolized Trinidadian and English societies highlight specific cultural and linguistic aspects and that intertextuality is either convergent or divergent. For instance, the structure of Naipaul’s text takes as much from Caribbean orature and the wake of Caribbean plantation culture. However, Selvon’s novel takes the form of flashbacks. Naipaul innovates and transforms Selvon’s structure to generate a Caribbean context, par excellence. Traces of Selvon’s style are present in Naipaul’s corrosive voice of representing Caribbean identity. Naipaul brings to an apotheosis the creative force already illustrated in the remarkable works of Selvon. This paper aims to track these traces and foreground the idea that texts can speak to each other. More significantly, this paper assesses the main characters’ fates to re-question the status of creoles, a status deliberately put between parentheses, denying them the right to voice their hybrid identities. Above all, the close textual reading of Galahad’s and Singh’s stories is meant to value the trope of intertextuality.

London's Burning: Structuralist Readings of the Urban Inferno in the 1950's British Literature of Multi-culturalism

This article examines a literary triangle treating a modern re-imagining of the Dantean Inferno in Caribbean migrant experience. Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners advanced a stylistic and intellectual revolution in post-World War II British literature, inspiring Colin MacInnes’ Absolute Beginners in the founding literary texts of contemporary British multi-cultural society. It followed the template of Jean Rhys Voyage in the Dark. We must read these complex texts to understand the conflicted multi-cultural society that Britain has become today: they deal with identity and solidarity, atomisation and commodification, Empire and capitalism, while throwing light on the most recent advances in historical and theoretical scholarship by pioneers such as Olivette Otele and Reni Eddo-Lodge. Moreover, these texts throw new light on unanswered Structuralist and Post-Structuralist debates from Emile Durkheim to Martin Heidegger. This article examines the intersectionality of class, gender and race within both the national British framework of post-war capitalism and the wider colonial heritage of slavery and forced labour, highlighting voices who articulated an ideal of multi-cultural humanism that remains crucial today.

The Uneven Travels of World Literature

Abstract The essay engages with possibilities of translating Creole in Anglophone world literatures and investigates the socio-political frames within which translations occur. It has been argued that it is impossible to translate, read and understand the connotations of Creole without their historical and cultural contexts, from which these linguistic varieties are derived and which they conversely help produce. Texts thriving on Creole, such as Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, are highly context-sensitive and call for close, historically and locally grounded readings. The translation and translatability of Creole begs crucial questions concerning the common understanding of world literature as travelling texts. The essay discusses these questions with an eye to the role of English as a global literary vernacular, before moving on to examine Miriam Mandelkow’s recent German translation of Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners.

RESISTING DOMINANT CULTURE IN THE LONELY LONDONERS: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

This paper investigates the resistance of immigrants to cultural dominance of London society in The Lonely Londoners, a postcolonial novel by Sam Selvon. The Lonely Londoners (1956) depicts the miserable life of Caribbean people who migrated in hope to find better condition of living than their countries. The paper furnishes a theoretic ground for analyzing the discourse of the novel which presents the subject of resisting dominant culture throughout events and language used by the novelist. The paradigm of immigrants, their trauma and shock have always been the spot line of discussion after WWII. Through the colonial history there was a dominant discourse of Western cultural superiority imposed on colonized, with the postcolonial era a different discourse emerged through intellectual presentations such as Fanon, Said, Bhabha ideas and others who enlightened literary theory and criticism and theorized resistance and cultural identity. Thus, this paper will critically analyze the discourse of resistance of Postcolonial people in exile to ascertain their existence and identity. Keywords: Post colonialism, Discourse analysis, Resistance, Identity

Making sense of memory in the writings of the Caribbean diaspora: Sam Selvon’s London calypso

ABSTRACTThis article examines Sam Selvon’s use of the conventions of Trinidadian calypso in his novel The Lonely Londoners. It considers Selvon’s use of calypso in the creation of a narrative voice expressing the dilemma of Caribbean immigrants in London as paradigmatic of the ways in which aesthetic experimentation traces new trajectories of migrant experience, thus problematizing binary visions of cultural displacement. Particular emphasis is placed on Selvon’s use of narrative voice to integrate the sounds of calypso, producing a sonic background that gives aesthetic shape to the discordant experiences of his characters. This use of calypso transforms the novel into a cultural performance of memory through which two aesthetic forms, the novel and calypso, become the locus of a remotivating of collective memory.

COMPARING BRITISH AND CARIBBEAN NATIONHOOD IN THE LONELY LONDONERS

Concepts of nation and nationalism have been among mainly debated points in the fields of social sciences since the spread of nation-states in Europe which goes back to especially the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century. However, these concepts have been discussed not only among the European nations but also among the Third World countries which gained their independence and which were left by their native citizens who wished to immigrate to the European metropolises because of a variety of reasons and attractions. As a member of such immigrants from the Caribbean islands who floated into London after the Second World War, Sam Selvon touches upon the perceptions of nation and nationalism in The Lonely Londoners by reflecting these concepts from the viewpoint of the British nation and the Caribbean nation in the light of the Caribbean immigrants in Britain through different norms which play the basic role in defining a nation. Selvon can be thought to assert that while the British society bases its principles in defining a nation on discrimination and racial characteristics, particularly its superiority over the black immigrants and nations, the Caribbean immigrants identify these norms by emphasizing their common cultural elements and their potentials rather than racial and ethnic divisions and by adapting themselves to their collectively generated and fused values over time.

Reflections on Sam Selvon

The Housing Lark (1965) is a novel that will be immediately recognisable to readers acquainted with Selvon’s earlier, and best-known, work, The Lonely Londoners (1956). The narrative structure is l...