Modes of Reading The Lonely Londoners (Sam Selvon) Lecture 1

Culture represents a way of living, not merely what we watch and listen to
How culture changes and modulates in relation to the physical space
BATMAN Gotham City has a transformative relationship with Batman
Written in 1956 in 1952 theres a big outcry about smog and fog.
Inability to see. Novel begins with character lost in unreality
Writing the City Dickens starts Bleak House in fog the inability to see
and decode the city
T.S. Eliot begins the Wasteland with unreal city Under the brown fog of a
winter dawn.
Selvon deliberately echoes Eliot and others preceding him in his opening.
Following tradition. He may be an outsider but hes going to twist and
tweak it with his own unqie literary voice
Deliberately not using standard English Caribbean syntax and dialect
become part of literary tradition, moulding and changing the way we
represent the Britishness of London simultaneous alignment and
disassociation
(Kenneth Ramchand, Celebrating Sam Selvon)
Conversion of orality into literariness manifests itself in language, form,
structure, relationship between the reader and the text
Calypso music singing back and forth, immediacy with the audience,
vernacular (common street parlance) relates to Selvons relationship with
his audience
A Great Restlessness numerous territories arriving and leaving
In the 1950s this changes your perspective of London and literature in
general gives evidence of changes
SS Windrush docks and first Caribbean immigrants disembark
Your sense of what home is not only changes but becomes incredibly
complicated, multiple competing senses of belonging
Not only immigrants that feel displaced, lonely not just a character of
immigrants but of the modern world. Movement becomes the signature of
modernity
To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us
adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world
and, at the same time, threatens to destroy everything we have,
everything we know, everything we are.
Immigrant excited by London so excited that he does not feel the cold
Contradictory pull between various ways of belonging is a feeling common
to everyone in the world
We are no longer moored to one home in a concentrated dramatic form
recognisable emotions.
Anxiety that everything you have experienced will disappear in a
heartbeat
Idea of belonging is problematic.

1948, UK nationality act every person born within the United Kingdom
and the colonies is entitled to uk citizenship. Changes the concept of who
a British person is.
Laws are revised in 1962 to control immigration, authorised deportation.
Immigrants in Londoners caught between these ideas do they belong?
Why are they there when they could be in a nicer place? Something is
keeping them there. Cultural