Entangled peripheries: Spatial agency in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet and Caryl Phillips’s The Lost Child

ABSTRACT

With the increase in global mobility, notions of centre and periphery are becoming more unstable. Urban centres of colonial significance lose their importance as diasporic literature in general, and Black British literature in particular, explores liminal spatial perspectives within the diasporic experience. Two contemporary Black British novels, Jackie Kay’s Trumpet (1998) and Caryl Phillips’s The Lost Child (2015), imagine British peripheries as spaces of personal and cultural significance. The periphery is analysed here as a material presence in the novels and considered as a locale that is multiple at its core. Revealing European peripheries as entangled in a complex web of historical and cultural implications, these Black British fictions shed light on peripheral spaces from a non-dominant European perspective and demonstrate a shift in understanding the periphery not only as an opposition to the centre, but as a locus for the negotiation of postcolonial life in Britain.

KEYWORDS:

• Black British fiction
• British periphery
• Jackie Kay
• Trumpet
• Caryl Phillips
• The Lost Child

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For further considerations regarding spatiality in Black British and postcolonial literatures and cultures, see, for example, Ball (2004); Teverson and Upstone (2011).

2. For an in-depth analysis of Black British fictions since the 1940s, see, for example, Osborne (2016, 23–58).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Judith Rahn

Judith Rahn is a lecturer at the Department of English and American Studies at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf. She is currently completing her book Exploring Posthuman Life in Contemporary Fiction and is co-editor of Nonhuman Agencies in the 21st-Century Anglophone Novel (forthcoming 2021) and the Special Issue “Afrofuturism’s Transcultural Trajectories” (Critical Studies in Media Communication 37 (4), 2020). She is author of “(Re-)Negotiating Black Posthumanism: The Precarity of Race in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon” (Anglistik 30 (2), 2019). Her research interests include posthumanism, affect and new materialist theory, Afrofuturism, Black British fictions, and postcolonial literatures.