Hybridization in Economic Activities in Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and Moses Ascending

Samuel Selvon (1923-1994) is a representative writer in Caribbean literature. His Moses trilogy is famous for the preoccupation with issues of identity. My paper employs Homi Bhabha’s theory of hybridity to construct the identification of Creoles’. From the perspective of economic, The Lonely Londoners and Moses Ascending deal with the fractured and disjointed economic activities on the Londoners and Moses’ economic life, which cover from general economic life to personal economic behavior. The hybridization of economic activities helps Creoles walk out of the tough period and be able to support themselves. It is an effective way for them to be free from colonization economically.

Windrush

‘Windrush’ is a term used to describe the post-World War II generation of writers from the English-speaking Caribbean who were published (and most often lived) in Great Britain. Although generally associated with postcolonial or Caribbean literary studies, many of these writers—including authors such as Wilson Harris, George Lamming, and Samuel Selvon—were seen by their contemporaries as inheritors of the tradition of modernism. Adapting the formally experimental tendencies of pre-war modernism to anti-colonial critique, members of the Windrush generation were widely celebrated in the British literary world as a vibrant new group of writers along the lines of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. Pioneering figures in the emergence of Anglophone Caribbean literature, they also represent a lesser-known strain of late modernism, one that seized on the unruly, oppositional, and utopian energies characteristic of modernist writing and focused them more firmly on issues of race, ethnicity, and empire.

Selvon, Samuel (1923–1994)

Samuel Selvon was a Trinidadian writer whose vivid portraits of daily life in both the Caribbean and post-Second World War England garnered international acclaim. Selvon’s episodic storytelling, vernacular narration, and stylistic inventiveness have led critics past and present to classify his writing alongside both his modernist predecessors, and his postcolonial contemporaries. Selvon was born in Trinidad in 1923 to an East Indian father and an Anglo-Scottish mother. In his own words, he grew up as a ‘Creolized West Indian’. He worked as a wireless operator for the Royal Naval Reserve during the Second World. After the war ended in 1945, Selvon relocated to Port of Spain and began his early forays into journalism, contributing to The Trinidad Guardian and serving as the fiction editor for The Guardian Weekly. Selvon’s early stories and sketches, now collected in Foreday Morning, demonstrate his early preoccupation with the details of everyday life, a preoccupation that cuts across his writings. In 1950, somewhat disenchanted with what he called the ‘very complacent and easy going’ Trinidadian life, Selvon migrated to England on a boat that also carried the Barbadian novelist George Lamming.

Construction of Hybrid Identity in Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and Moses Ascending

Samuel Selvon (1923-1994) is an outstanding figure in Caribbean literature. His Moses trilogy is very famous because of his preoccupation with issues of identity and culture. His two representative works The Lonely Londoners and Moses Ascending giving a vivid description of Creole immigrants’ life in London, have a far-reaching influence on postcolonial literature. The thesis attempts to employ Homi Bhabha’s theory of hybridity to elaborate the formation of cultural identity. The thesis consists of three parts. Part One is Introduction, which gives a brief introduction to the author, his two works, the theoretical framework. Part Two presents the dilemma in which the Creoles have to face on cultural identity. In the aspect of cultural identity, the Creoles experience the process from identical crisis to the construction of hybrid identity. Part Three is Conclusion. Based on the above analyses, the thesis draws the conclusion that different cultures can influence each other. The effective way to solve identical crisis is to build the hybrid identity.

Immigrants Identity Crisis in The Lonely Londoners

<div><p><em>This paper looks into the novel The Lonely Londoner by Samuel Selvon that is reviewed as a postcolonial novel. The paper examines the plight of the Caribbean migrants who traveled to England hoping that the fairytales they had been fed on by the colonizers were realistic and confined to England. The study considers the predicament that these migrants went through in their colonizer's homeland where they felt despised and derelict against their immense hope that they had when they were leaving their native islands. The paper also looks into the theme of mimicry as posted by Homi Bhabha in his postcolonial theory. By considering the view of Bhabha, the paper looks deeply into the theory advanced and how it is consequently used in the novel. Thus, the paper investigates how mimicry and hybridity have been portrayed in the novel The Lonely Londoner, and at the same time looks into how Samuel Selvon typically applied them to express his postcolonial discourse in his work.</em></p></div>

Hybridization in Political Civilization in Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and Moses Ascending

Samuel Selvon (1923-1994) is a great pioneer in Creole literature. His writing in the Moses trilogy is very representative because of his preoccupation with issues of identity and culture. The Lonely Londoners, published in 1956, and Moses Ascending, published in 1975, are two of them. These two books telling Creole immigrants’ story have been recognized as a great masterpiece in Caribbean literature, which have a far-reaching influence on postcolonial literature. This thesis attempts to employ Homi Bhabha’s theory of hybridity to illustrate the Creoles’ struggle against colonization and the construction of political hybridity. The thesis consists of three parts. Part One is Introduction, which presents a short introduction to the author Samuel Selvon, his two works, the theoretical framework. Part Two depicts the process of the Creoles’ struggle against colonization in political civilization. In the aspect of politics, the Creoles experience the process from unawareness of politics to pursuing their political dream. They attempt to construct their own political system on the basis of the British mode. Part Three is Conclusion. Based on the above analyses, the thesis draws the conclusion that different cultures can influence each other. The effective way to realize decolonization is the construction of political hybridity.