Unveiling Transnational Narratives: Language, Identity, and Space in Andrea Levy’s Small Island

Abstract

Set in the aftermath of World War II, Andrea Levy’s Small Island follows the lives of four characters – Queenie, a white British woman; her husband Bernard, a soldier returning from the war; Gilbert, a Jamaican immigrant who served in the Royal Air Force; and Hortense, his ambitious yet disillusioned wife – against the backdrop of a transforming London that is gradually shedding its status as the stronghold of Britishness and becoming a fluid, transnational space in which identities are formed and reshaped through interaction with the metropolitan environment. Drawing on postcolonial studies of identity and space by Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Yi-Fu Tuan, and John Clement Ball, this contribution aims to investigate the dynamics of this process – where language becomes a genuine instrument of power – and to demonstrate that, amid the rich diversity of metropolitan life depicted by Levy, space and the individual co-constitute one another as transnational entities whose survival depends on transcending the “us” versus “them” dichotomy and recognising a pervasive, necessary hybridity.