This article examines depictions of interracial violence in Andrea Levy’s Small Island to argue that the novel challenges the ways that interraciality is mobilized as a symbol of progress. By examining tropes of black edibility and white consumption, this article situates the duality of attraction and repulsion white characters feel for black characters within libidinal economies of racialized desire and power. Through an analysis of main protagonist Queenie’s anti-blackness towards her black friends, lovers, and child, this article argues that love and affection themselves are implicated within racialized economies of power and an anti-black desirability politics that seeks to possess and destroy black people.
AndermahrS (2019) Decolonizing cultural memory in Andrea Levy’s Small Island. Journal of Postcolonial Writing55(4): 555–569.
2.
AspinallPJ (2015) Social representations of “mixed-race” in early twenty-first-century Britain: Content, limitations, and counter-narratives. Ethnic and Racial Studies38(7): 1067–1083.
3.
BlandL (2017) Interracial relationships and the “brown baby question”: Black GIs, white British women, and their mixed-race offspring in World War II. Journal of the History of Sexuality26(3): 424–453.
4.
BrophyS (2010) Entangled genealogies: White femininity on the threshold of change in Andrea Levy’s Small Island. Contemporary Women’s Writing4(2): 114–133.
5.
CarbyHV (2019) Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands. New York: Verso.
6.
CarrollR (2014) Small Island, small screen: Adapting Black British fictions. In: BaxterJJamesD (eds) Andrea Levy: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. New York: Bloomsbury, 65–78.
7.
DawsonA (2007) Mongrel Nation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
8.
DuboinC (2006) Contested identities: Migrant stories and liminal selves in Andrea Levy's Small Island. Obsidian12(1): 14–33.
9.
EllisAE (2012) Identity as cultural production in Andrea Levy’s Small Island. EnterText9: 69–83.
10.
EvelynK (2013) Claiming a space in the thought-I-knew-you-place: Migrant domesticity, diaspora, and home in Andrea Levy’s Small Island. South Atlantic Review78(3–4): 129–149.
11.
FanonF (1967) Black Skin, White Masks (trans. RPhilcox). New York: Grove Press.
12.
FlemingRM (1929–30) Human hybrids. Eugenics Review21(4): 257–263.
13.
FletcherME (1930) Report on an Investigation into the Colour Problem in Liverpool and Other Ports. Liverpool: Association for the Welfare of Half-Caste Children.
14.
FrankenbergR (1993) White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
15.
GilroyP (1987) There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
16.
GoffeTL (2019) Sugarwork: The gastropoetics of Afro-Asia after the plantation. Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas5: 31–56.
17.
HallS (1991) Old and new identities, old and new ethnicities. In: KingAD (ed) Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 41–68.
18.
HallS (2017) Racism and reaction. In: DavisonSFeatherstoneDRustinMSchwarzB (eds) Selected Political Writings: The Great Moving Right Show and Other Essays. Durham: Duke University Press, 142–157.
19.
HartmanS (1996) Seduction and the ruses of power. Callaloo19(2): 537–560.
20.
HewittG (2020) The Windrush scandal: An insider’s reflection. Caribbean Quarterly66(1): 108–128.
21.
Hill CollinsP (1990) Black Feminist Thought. New York, Routledge.
22.
hooksb (2015) Black Looks: Race and Representation. New York: Routledge.
23.
IbrahimH (2012) Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
24.
JacksonZI (2020) Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York: New York University Press.
25.
KayJ (1998) Trumpet. New York: Pantheon.
26.
LevyA (1996) Never Far from Nowhere.
27.
LevyA (2004) Small Island. London: Headline.
28.
McLeodJ (2015) Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption. New York: Bloomsbury.
29.
McNeillS (1946) Illegitimate Children Born in Britain of English Mothers and Coloured Americans: Report of a Survey. London: The League of Coloured Peoples.
30.
Nassy-BrownJ (2005) Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
31.
NavaM (2007) Visceral Cosmopolitanism: Gender, Culture and the Normalisation of Difference. New York: Berg.
32.
PlummerBG (2014) Making ‘brown babies’: Race and gender after World War II. In: RosenbergESFitzpatrickS (eds) Body and Nation: The Global Realm of US Body Politics in the Twentieth Century. Durham: Duke University Press, 147–172.
33.
SextonJ (2008) Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
34.
SmithG (1987) When Jim Crow Met John Bull: Black American Soldiers in World War II Britain. London: I. B. Tauris.
35.
SmithZ (2000) White Teeth. New York: Vintage.
36.
SmithZ (2012) NW. New York: Vintage.
37.
SharpeC (2009) Monstrous Intimacies: Make Post-Slavery Subjects. Durham: Duke University Press.
38.
TabiliL (1996) Women “of a very low type’: Crossing racial boundaries in imperial Britain. In: FraderLLRoseSO (eds) Gender and Class in Modern Europe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 165–190.
39.
TompkinsKW (2012) Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century. New York: New York University Press.
40.
TwineFW (2010) A White Side of Black Britain: Interracial Intimacy and Racial Literacy. Durham: Duke University Press.
41.
WebbC (2017) Special relationships: Mixed-race couples in post-war Britain and the United States. Women’s History Review26(1): 110–129.
42.
WeheliyeAG (2014) Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press.
43.
WildersonFBIII (2010) Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms. Durham: Duke University Press.
