(Re) Mapping London: Gender and Racial Relations in Andrea Levy’s Small Island

Abstract

Andrea Levy’s Small Island engages with the impact that the war, together with the immigration and settlement of members coming from the West Indies had on the spatial and social configuration of the city of London during the years following the Second World War. Unlike other literary works dealing with the same topic, Levy presents a wider view of the social problems affecting that period of time by acknowledging that the coming of immigrants to Britain was a two-way process that had an effect on both the newcomers and the white British population. Moreover, Levy gives voice to a part of the immigrants that had been frequently silenced in previous literary works: the female population. In this article I shall examine the way in which the characters, with special focus on the female ones, negotiate readjustments in the body-identity-space relation and find a space of their own in the newly emerging spatial and social order of the city of London. It is my contention to examine how space is depicted, drawing on the notion that space is a social construct that is in a continuous process of formation and modification to pinpoint the ways in which gender and racial relations have operated in Britain during the historical period of the post-war years. By so doing, I shall bring into light the role of women in the processes of re/constructing new senses of identity and new cartographies of the city of London after the Second World War.