공간에서 장소로

From Space to Place: Remapping London in Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners

Although the recent diaspora discourses tend to read diasporic experience as a creative catalyst for a new hybrid culture rather than a forced separation between a human being and a native place, the displaced people are still tied up with the places where they lived. By focusing on their relationship between the immigrants and the places, this paper aims to explore the way in which Selvon's The Lonely Londoners remaps, reimagines, and reterritorializes London. Selvon seems to find the driving force to remap the city from his Caribbean working-class immigrants who belong to the Caribbean folk culture, not the Westernized middle-class culture. The novel sketches a variety of episodes that describe how the characters are struggling to settle down in the city, and also how some parts of London such as the Piccadilly Circus and the Harrow Road are Caribbeanized by the immigrants' way of behaving. This paper will reveal that through Caribbean immigrant's own cultural heritage from their home ranging from Carnival, Calypso, and "a Caribbean dialect" to even eating pigeons and spreading a credit business in a neighborhood, Selvon's Londoners can slowly but gradually transform an inhospitable and hostile space into a familiar and habitable place which they can claim as their second home.