UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation asks how global circulation and displacement invite us to reconsider our conceptions of nationhood and socio-spatial urban belonging. I center my study of immigration on the city because international migration is a driving force of urbanization that has fundamentally altered the socio-spatial landscapes of cities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In particular, my project anchors on London because it has been undeniably shaped by colonialism, immigration, and urban renewal into the world city it is today. The existence of the immigrant border-crosser undermines the fixity of the border and reveals white nationalism to be a fragile and ultimately incomprehensible model for citizenship today. London emerges as a space of conflict; a city in which marginalized subjects challenge the coherence of the category of citizen and reorient us towards models of urban collectivity that are imperfect, messy and conflictual but offer some hope for urban co-existence across differences of race, ethnicity, and culture.To study how immigrants are inhabiting the city I read cultural texts produced by non-white, non-European, first and second generation immigrant authors originating from former British colonies including Africa, India, Pakistan and the Middle East: from the novels of Caribbean colonial expatriate Jean Rhys; to the fiction of Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta and Windrush author Andrea Levy; to the literary texts and cinema of Hanif Kureishi; ending with a reading of a contemporary refugee novel by Moshin Hamid, and covering a publication span of 1931 to 2017. Each of my chapters addresses the impact of a different wave of transnational migration that has shaped London as a global postmetropolis: from colonial migrations during the British Empire (1930s), to the Windrush generation (1948), and more recent waves of immigration, no longer strictly colonial or post-colonial, from the 1960s onwards. These cultural texts of transnational migration extend Henri Lefebvre’s demand for a ‘renewed access to urban life’: a call to action for the city dweller as a new political subject with the tools to reshape, reform, and reclaim the city as their own. This project is invested in interdisciplinary work, and as such I bring multiple theoretical discourses into dialogue with one another, including but not limited to urban studies through Henri Lefebvre and Fredric Jameson, immigration studies; in particular ​​Étienne Balibar’s work on borders, postcolonial feminist theory through Françoise Vergès and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, psychoanalysis through Julia Kristeva, and contemporary iterations of biopolitics, in particular Mel Chen and Roberto Episito’s work. “Colonial Exhibiting: Jean Rhys’ “Wild” Women” reads a selection of Jean Rhys’ cosmopolitan novels alongside artistic expositions of the colonial other such as Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) to unpack the relationship between wildness, art, and objectification. Rhys foregrounds the liminality of colonial expatriate women to challenge and destabilize the intersecting patriarchal and colonial logics that shape the surveilling male imperial gaze of the anthropomorphised city, which actively participates in the protagonists’ oppression and surveillance in the novels. While the novels strive to expose the violence of British imperialism, they elide white settler womens’ complicity in colonialism and are limited by their dependence on precisely those colonialist binaries they endeavor to challenge. “City Bodies, Urban Texts: Race, Empire, and Residential Politics in Immigrant Council Estate Fictions” looks at the aftermath of the midcentury migration of the “Windrush” generation of Commonwealth citizens who were brought to London to combat labor shortages and rebuild after World War II. I look at urban belonging for these immigrant communities through the lens of residential politics, reading a set of council estate novels by Buchi Emecheta, Monica Ali, and Zadie Smith which center the experience of first and second generation minority ethic immigrant women attempting to navigate social housing environments in London. The liminality of the council estate unsettles binary divisions between public and private, and city and home, and fosters visions of urban residential belonging that begin in the home but extend beyond it, working to problematize harmful stereotypes of the ‘problem family’ and ‘problem estate’. As examples of postcolonial bildungsromane which adopt minority ethnic immigrant women as their protagonists, the novels reveal how the assimilation of these women is contingent on their wilful submission to white supremacy and nationalism, and challenge the nineteenth century bildungsroman’s trajectory of capitalist assimilation. “The City of Exiles”: Dirt, Waste, and Gentrification in Margaret Thatcher’s London” examines the impact of Margaret Thatcher’s racist, anti-immigration policies during the 1980s, connecting the urban management of dirt to gentrification and ethnic cleansing. This chapter deconstructs instances where migrants become mapped onto sites, locales, or engagements with refuse. I read a span of Hanif Kureishi’s works which harness the creative and transformational potential of dirt to counteract the boundary policing mechanisms of hygiene discourse and practice. These cultural artifacts are examples of ‘dirty utopias’ which open up alternative ways of being in the world which arise out of, respond to, and counter conditions of oppression and precarity. “Beyond the Border: Global Mass Migration and the Brexit era” focuses on contemporary global fluxes of migration, and in particular on the precarious status of the refugee in a world where the intersecting factors of late stage capitalism, globalization, global warming, and global conflict make the safe movement and rehousing of people from around the world a more urgent concern than ever before. Moshin Hamid’s Exit West projects readers into a prospective future in which vast scale global migrations to the west have already taken place. In doing so Hamid repositions refugee displacement from a “crisis” to an inevitable reality, focussing on in the aftermath of mass migration for which nation state models of citizenship have been ultimately unfit to meet the challenges and demands of a globalized world.