“ ‘It ain’t have no sort of family life for us here’ ”: Community
and its Discontents in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners
Abstract
Sam Seldon’s The Lonely Londoners depicts an emergent collectivity of
black immigrants who lead literally and metaphorically subterranean
lives in 1950s Britain. Against the backdrop of a city undergoing an
ambivalent transition from colonial metropole to postmodern cosmopolis,
Seldon’s “boys” remain largely inscrutable to and estranged from not
only white Londoners but also one another. Critics have associate a
depoliticized preoccupation with the everyday and eschewal of critical
consciousness in Seldon’s work with widely critiqued features of
Anglophone modernism. The present analysis suggests several reasons why
political collectivity remains elusive to Seldon’s black male immigrant
characters. Specifically, they face discriminatory access to the labor
market and social services, loci of possible solidarity with
working-class white Londoners where formal political resistance might be
coordinated. These systemic pressures combined with an atmospheric
racism cause many of the boys to internalize the racialist,
individualist, consumerist, and heterosexist attitudes and behaviors of
the dominant white culture, which they adopt as survival strategies, in
effect undermining black group identity and cohesion. If a note of
optimism is to be sounded amid the many challenges to inter- and
intraracial community the novel presents, it is in the potential undoing
of black cultural nationalism that cultural theorist Paul Gilroy sees as
a crucial step in the making of an egalitarian, convivial postcolonial
world. The novel contests the homogenizing impulses of essentialist
identity politics by portraying the heterodox, sometimes paradoxical,
affinities that emerge between characters and communities.