In April 1993, Bridget Anderson’s sociological report Britain’s Secret Slaves unveiled the existence of slavery at the end of the 20th century, informing a shocked public opinion that in many a wealthy house of the UK domestic workers of Third World origin were systematically secluded, abused and beaten – sometimes raped; further investigations and Parliamentary initiatives followed. Deprived of any dignified status by the British legislation as well, these human beings were practically non-existent, ghosts occasionally surfacing from the depths of civilized British society – similarly to how Enlightenment modernity was (and still is) being haunted by the ghosts of the slave trade, as shown by scholars such as Iain Chambers, Fred D’Aguiar and Paul Gilroy. This paper intends to examine the ways in which this haunting presence has spread through the body of multicultural Britain, how it has branched out into other genres different from the usual postcolonial essay or novel, such as detective and dystopian fiction. The first case in point was explicitly based on Anderson’s research: Ruth Rendell’s Simisola (1994) is an Inspector Wexford bestseller which focuses on the mystery surrounding the identity of an African domestic worker. Local politics, class faultlines and houses haunted by such domestic violence all contribute to the creation of a complex social setting in a small community in quiet Sussex. The second one is Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), an unsettling dystopian novel about an isolated college where test-tube babies are educated into their adulthood, in order to create a race of organ donors for ‘normal’ people in need. Ishiguro purges his novel’s setting from any postcolonial and multicultural connotation and depicts a visionary, a-historical (or alternative history) England that is also an allegory of the vampirist nature of contemporary society. His peculiar, hyper-rarefied perspective emphasizes, thanks to its focus on the donors’ sentimental education, the sheer inhumanity of our exploitative structures of feeling, including postcolonial ones. Are these novels two exemplary cases of non-strictly-postcolonial, mainstream literature haunted by urgent postcolonial issues, and to what extent? What shifts, if any, are brought by Anderson’s book onto the standard paradigms of bestselling crime fiction in Simisola? And what analogies can be traced with Ishiguro’s dystopia? This paper attempts to answer such questions, amongst others.

Human Bondage in Contemporary UK and Its Generic Transformations: From Bridget Anderson's "Britain's Secret Slaves" to Ruth Rendell's "Simisola"and Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go"

DEANDREA, Pietro
2009-01-01

Abstract

In April 1993, Bridget Anderson’s sociological report Britain’s Secret Slaves unveiled the existence of slavery at the end of the 20th century, informing a shocked public opinion that in many a wealthy house of the UK domestic workers of Third World origin were systematically secluded, abused and beaten – sometimes raped; further investigations and Parliamentary initiatives followed. Deprived of any dignified status by the British legislation as well, these human beings were practically non-existent, ghosts occasionally surfacing from the depths of civilized British society – similarly to how Enlightenment modernity was (and still is) being haunted by the ghosts of the slave trade, as shown by scholars such as Iain Chambers, Fred D’Aguiar and Paul Gilroy. This paper intends to examine the ways in which this haunting presence has spread through the body of multicultural Britain, how it has branched out into other genres different from the usual postcolonial essay or novel, such as detective and dystopian fiction. The first case in point was explicitly based on Anderson’s research: Ruth Rendell’s Simisola (1994) is an Inspector Wexford bestseller which focuses on the mystery surrounding the identity of an African domestic worker. Local politics, class faultlines and houses haunted by such domestic violence all contribute to the creation of a complex social setting in a small community in quiet Sussex. The second one is Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), an unsettling dystopian novel about an isolated college where test-tube babies are educated into their adulthood, in order to create a race of organ donors for ‘normal’ people in need. Ishiguro purges his novel’s setting from any postcolonial and multicultural connotation and depicts a visionary, a-historical (or alternative history) England that is also an allegory of the vampirist nature of contemporary society. His peculiar, hyper-rarefied perspective emphasizes, thanks to its focus on the donors’ sentimental education, the sheer inhumanity of our exploitative structures of feeling, including postcolonial ones. Are these novels two exemplary cases of non-strictly-postcolonial, mainstream literature haunted by urgent postcolonial issues, and to what extent? What shifts, if any, are brought by Anderson’s book onto the standard paradigms of bestselling crime fiction in Simisola? And what analogies can be traced with Ishiguro’s dystopia? This paper attempts to answer such questions, amongst others.
2009
Forms of Migration, Migration of Forms: Literature
Progedit
volume "Literature"
402
417
9788861940550
http://www.progedit.com
Anderson; Rendell; Ishiguro; schiavitù; Regno Unito; multiculturalismo; migranti; letteratura XX secolo e XXI secolo; fantasma; campo di concentramento; postcolonialismo; distopia
P. Deandrea
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/2318/60648
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