Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners and the structure of Black metropolitan life

Abstract

The paper argues that Sam Selvon's novel The Lonely Londoners (1956), whilst offering a study of the metropolitan experience of post-war African and Caribbean immigrants to London, gives profound insights into the fundamental structure of Black metropolitan subjectivity generally. The theoretical work of Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Stuart Hall and, Paul Gilroy, among others, is used to illuminate particular aspects of the location of the Black subject in the London metropolis. The paper concludes by arguing that the novel's rendering of Diasporic metropolitan life works with a dialectical shift in the perception of the character of the metropolis.

Keywords:

• Black metropolis
• Black British writing
• Sam Selvon
• Black flaneur
• utopia and dystopia
• African and Black Diaspora