London Staged as a Postcolonial City in Hanif Kureishi's London Kills Me
17th METU British Novelists Conference: Hanif Kureishi and His Work, Ankara, Türkiye, 17 - 18 Aralık 2009, ss.66-72, (Tam Metin Bildiri)
- Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Tam Metin Bildiri
- Basıldığı Şehir: Ankara
- Basıldığı Ülke: Türkiye
- Sayfa Sayıları: ss.66-72
- Ankara Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
Contemporary London is a postcolonial city, having marked a critical stage in the relationship of the empowered and the authorized with the excluded and the marginalized. Hanif Kureishi in his screenplay "London Kills Me" presents a group of ostracized and subordinate Londoners who cannot identify themselves with the organizing principles of the dominant discourse. Kureishi "seeks inclusion of the subordinate into the world of, and values privileged by, the dominant" (Needham 20). He gives voice to the underrepresented and/or misrepresented, who are rather acting on the loopholes in the dominant discourse. The lives of the characters in the play are plagued by rootlessness, yet they feel they "have to get along in a network of already established forces and representations" (McLeod 9). From a Foucauldian viewpoint, Kureishi gives voice to these delinquent Londoners on their odysseys on the way to be included into the dominant discourse; the knowledge about this group, that is, the "subjugated or marginal knowledges" have long been ignored and repressed in a functionalist coherence and formal systematization (in McHoul 15). From the onset of the play, London is clearly delineated as a postcolonial city. With the end of the World War II, London has undergone significant conversions in the fabric of its citizenry as a "consequence of patterns of migration from countries with a history of colonialism" (McLeod 6). As McLeod asserts, "the urban and human geography of London has been irreversibly altered" and today London's neighbourhoods are marked chiefly by the inhabitants of overseas populations they have nurtured (6). Thus, London as a city is characterized as "a diachronic and heterogeneous location of migration, mobility, and instability" by the dynamic workings of "a polyvalent unity of conflictual programmes or contractual proximities" (9). With the substantial variation in its populace, London occupies a critical place "in the evolution of postcolonial oppositional thought and action” and has long been seen as a "site of creativity and conflict" among the multiracial and multicultural inhabitants (McLeod 6). London, in Kureishi’s screenplay "London Kills Me”, is staged as a heterogeneous, diverse, hybrid and a polycultural city with its multifarious inhabitants.