From Conflict To Reconciliation—Cultural Identity In Small Island

Andrea Levy (1956-) is regarded as one of the most famous Jamaican-British writers in contemporary English literature. As a second generation of Jamaican immigrants brought up in London, Levy embodies a hybrid of traditional Jamaican culture and modern British identity. In her masterpiece Small Island, through description about the life of a black Jamaican immigrant couple (Gilbert and Hortense) and a white middle-class London couple (Bernard and Queenie), Levy combines history with her parents’personal experiences of immigration, adopts a multi-voiced way of narration and a poignant sense of humor, and tells a story about the illusion and disillusion of Jamaican immigrants in Britain during and after WWII. At the same time, Levy also draws her attention to the British people’s hardships and confusion after the war. In this novel, Levy mainly describes the process of identity conflict and reconciliation between people from different nations, races and classes. It also serves as a memory book of Levy’s own family, her parents’dilemma and compromise in their new life, and eventually, the hope and promise they possess after all their frustrations and struggles.Based on the subject of Small Island, this thesis proposes a study of cultural identity issues in the novel with the support of the identity theory by Jamaican-British cultural critic Stuart Hall (1932-2014). The analysis is divided into three specific aspects, namely, national, racial and class identity. By the study of the four protagonists’life with prejudice, clash and compromise with each other, this thesis takes a research on the complicated relationships of people with different cultural identities, Jamaican versus British, black versus white, low-class versus high-class. The thesis takes the black-white baby born at the end of the novel as a symbol of hybrid of identities, revealing the cruel but hopeful process of identification. It contends that no matter how hard cultural identity process proves to be for immigrants and natives, there is still hope for their future, as this is their only way out. In this sense, Small Island offers a sample study of cultural identity, which involves both destruction and reconstruction. And Levy grants to the world a complicated but promising view of modern life, a zigzag path from conflict to reconciliation.