Border experiences and liminal identities in andrea levy’s short stories

Abstract

Andrea Levy’s work is characterised by a critical engagement with ethnicity, national identity and culture of the Jamaican diaspora in the United Kingdom. This chapter examines Levy’s “That Polite Way English People Have” and “Uriah’s War”, two short stories included in the collection Six Stories & An Essay (2014). Here Levy deals with Britain’s Caribbean narratives, violently blotted out from British mainstream history. Posed in an interstitial position between her Jamaican legacy and a British background, Levy’s hybrid identity is metaphorically signalled in the narrative through the choice of liminal spaces which work as indication of her identitary conflicts.