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Relocating Marginalised Perspectives in London Literature: Bernardine Evaristo and Sarah Waters

This study explores how London's cultural capital is utilized to re-locate marginalized perspectives in the works of Bernardine Evaristo and Sarah Waters. It analyzes the role of London as a backdrop and dominating metaphor in their novels, Soul Tourists and The Night Watch, and examines how these authors reconceive history and challenge societal norms.

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Relocating Marginalised Perspectives in London Literature: Bernardine Evaristo and Sarah Waters

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  1. Millennial London Literature: Utilising the Cultural Capital of London to Re-locate Marginalised Perspectives in the Work of Bernardine Evaristo and Sarah Waters. Dr Claire Allen Claire.allen@northampton.ac.uk

  2. London & the Novel • “It has rarely been just one thing at a time. Despite everyone from Inigo Jones to the GLC, it has never remained what its planners desired” (Roy Porter London: A Social History 9). • “The main qualification, surely, is that the city is not simply a backdrop of the action, but an essential feature and dominating metaphor throughout” (Ken Worpole 183).

  3. Michel Foucault “When I say ‘subjugated knowledges’ I mean two things. On the one hand, I am referring to historical contents that have been buried or masked in functional coherences or formal systemizations. ... [In other words, I am referring to] blocks of historical knowledges that were present in the functional and systematic ensembles, but which were masked, and the critique was able to reveal their existence by using, obviously enough, the tools of scholarship. Second, when I say ‘subjugated knowledges’ I am also referring to a whole series of knowledges that have been disqualified as...insufficiently elaborated knowledges: naive knowledges, hierarchically inferior knowledges, knowledges that are below the required level of erudition or scientificity.” (Society Must Be Defended 7)

  4. Soul Tourists (2005) • “I never knew there were black people in Russia.” (Evaristo, 243). • “body of history, turning its skin inside out and writing a new history upon it with a bone shaved down to a quill dipped in the ink of blood. Europe was not as it seemed, Stanley decided, and for him, at least, Europe would never be the same again” (189). • ‘You mustn’t generalize’, he said, adopting his banker-speak. ‘No one nation is homogenous, no matter what its PR machine says. Did you know there were black people in sixteenth century England and eighteenth-century France par exemple? Who knows what’s in the genes of your average Frenchman or Briton today?’(132)

  5. Reconcieving History? • “The social and political future of the British Isles rests upon the ability of its conflicted populations to reconceive of Britain’s past and present in transcultural terms, recognising and prizing the unruly rhythms of arrival, settlement and departure which London particularly, but not exclusively, exemplifies.” (John McLeod Postcolonial London 178)

  6. The Night Watch (2006) • “Duncan held the pipe up and studied it. ‘I wonder what that man’s name was. Doesn’t it torment you, that we’ll never know” (Waters, 87). • “So this, said Kay to herself, is the sort of person you’ve become: a person whose clocks and wrist-watches have stopped” (original italics 3) • “it still had the scars, on either side, where it had been attached to its neighbours, the zig-zag of phantom staircases and the dints of absent hearths” (7).

  7. Conclusion “Everywhere continuity and change coalesce; forms and functions mutate; past buildings and townscapes enhance but inhibit the present; the future refashions the debris of the past” (Roy Porter, 9).

  8. Bibliography Primary Evaristo, Bernardine. Soul Tourists.London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005. Waters, Sarah. The Night Watch. London: Virago Press, 2006. Secondary Doan, Laura and Sarah Waters. ‘Making up Lost Time: Contemporary Lesbian Writing and the Intervention of History’. Territories of Desire in Queer Culture: Reconfiguring Contemporary Boundaries. Eds. David Alderson and Linda Anderson Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. London: Harvester Press, 1980. ---Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2003. McLeod, John. Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis. London: Routledge, 2004. Porter, Roy (1994). London: A Social History. London: Penguin Books, 2000. Worpole, Ken. ‘Mother to Legend (or going underground): The London Novel.’ Peripheral Visions: Images of Nationhood in Contemporary British Fiction. Ed. Ian A. Bell. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995. 181-193.

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