Repping your Ends: Imagined borders in recent British multicultural fiction

Abstract

This article explores the phenomenon of imagined borders in recent multicultural British fiction. Focussing on Sunjeev Sahota's Ours Are the Streets (2011), Bernadine Evaristo's Hello Mum (2010), and Stephen Kelman's Pigeon English (2011), it suggests that borders figure here in a very different way from the celebratory mode of much border theory and many earlier multicultural novels (e.g. Zadie Smith's White Teeth). Drawing on Diener and Hagen's Borders (2012) as well as on general ideas about borders by Homi Bhabha, Kenan Malik, Salman Rushdie, Arjun Appadurai, and other thinkers, the article argues that in recent multicultural British fiction about gangs and (potential) fundamentalist terrorism, borders are common spatial tropes and unambiguous, if imaginary, markers that you cross at your peril. © 2013 The Author.