Eastern Europeans in Contemporary Literature and Culture:Imagining New Europe

This timely volume provides the first comprehensive study of the way in which contemporary writers, filmmakers and the media have represented the recent phenomenon of Eastern European migration to the UK and Western Europe following the enlargement of the EU in the 21st century, the social and political changes after the fall of communism, and the Brexit vote. Exploring the recurring figures of Eastern Europeans as a new reservoir of cheap labour, the author engages with a wide range of both mainstream and neglected authors, films and programmes, including Rose Tremain, John Lanchester, Marina Lewycka, Polly Courtney, Dubravka Ugresic, Kapka Kassabova, Kwame Kwei-Armah, It's a Free World, Gypo, Britain's Hardest Workers, The Poles are Coming and Czech Dream. Analyzing the treatment of Eastern Europeans as builders, fruit pickers, nannies and victims of sex trafficking, and ways of resisting the stereotypes, this is an important intervention into debates about Europe, migration, and post-communist transition to capitalism, as represented in multiple contemporary cultural texts

Melancholic travellers and the idea of (un)belonging in Bernardine Evaristo’s Lara and Soul Tourists

This article explores the articulations of (un)belonging in Bernardine Evaristo’s novel-in-verse Lara (1997) and novel-with-verse Soul Tourists (2005). It closely examines the precarious nature of belonging for the “second” generations of black British and their (un)belonging to the national, “originary” racial and generational lines of belonging, and to wider unresolved histories of loss that can be broadly defined as postcolonial and post-imperial. The article presents a case against reading Evaristo’s work, and black British literature more generally, as Bildungsromane. Locating Evaristo’s novels within recent interpretations of melancholia by Anne Anlin Cheng, by David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, and by Paul Gilroy, it calls into question the idea of the journey, in both Lara and Soul Tourists, as a process of self-formation and resolution of social conflicts. Revealing instead the moments of tension and non-resolution, it addresses the way in which Evaristo’s narratives challenge and haunt the very foundations on which the hegemonic discourses of belonging and history still rest