英文摘要 |
In her 2003 Guardian article ”Where I'm Coming from,” the Bangladeshi British woman writer Monica Ali poetically states that, as a writer, she has been ”seeking out the periphery” in ”the shadow of the doorway.” This article reads Ali's third novel ”In the Kitchen” (2009) to explore Ali's literary endeavor to seek out the periphery and to further examine its significance to contemporary writing of Britain. I argue that, in ”In the Kitchen”, the setting of the hotel and the kitchen, the Eastern European migrant characters, and the subject matter of the global sex industry and slavery distinguish Ali's writing of Britain from traditional black British and Asian British writings. In the novel, Ali not only strives to break away from the burden of representation that has long weighted on ethnic minority writers when they attempt to redefine Britishness, but she also directs the focus of attention from ethnicity to class and location. In particular, she goes beyond the questioning of white Britishness that the postcolonial diasporic communities of black Britain have long brought to the fore since the late 1940s by replacing the emphasis on the contemporaneity of Britain and on its overlooked dwelling and working places inhabited by the likewise invisible economic migrant workers from Eastern Europe and other parts of the world-the underclass and the new periphery of contemporary British society. The first section of the article briefly reviews the literary tradition of black British and Asian British writings to have a fuller understanding of Ali's literary endeavor to seek out the periphery, in particular her use of the ”shadow” as a motif. Focusing on ”In the Kitchen”, the second and third sections of the article then look into the ways that Ali represents the liminal spaces of the hotel and the kitchen in central London as the locations of globalization and the ways that she links them to the trope of the shadow to uncover the undercurrents of globalization and the corporeal politics that afflicts transnational migrant workers in contemporary Britain. |