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

Authors

  • Cristina Benicchi University of International Studies, Rome, Italy

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14712/23362685.5076

Keywords:

Transnational, identity, postcolonial, language, space, cultural dislocation, migration

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.

Author Biography

  • Cristina Benicchi, University of International Studies, Rome, Italy

    CRISTINA BENICCHI is an Associate Professor of English Language and Translation at the University of International Studies in Rome – UNINT. Her research activity – conducted in Italy and abroad, according to methodologies inspired by post-colonial studies, comparative studies, and linguistic-translation studies – is predominantly focused on Anglophone post-colonial literatures – with particular attention to the Caribbean area and the complex cultural and linguistic dynamics in the formation and transformation of identities in processes of dislocation and re-location – Comparative Literature, and Translation Studies. She has authored a considerable number of scholarly articles in esteemed national and international journals, in addition to a significant monograph that explores Anglophone Caribbean literature: La letteratura caraibica contemporanea. Modelli, Forme e Autori (2010). She is a member of the Italian Association of Anglistics (AIA) and the Italian Society of Comparative Literature (SICL).

Downloads

Published

2025-09-26

Issue

Vol. 14 No. 1 (2025): Prague Journal of English Studies

Section

Articles