ABSTRACT
Andrea Levy’s novel Small Island reflects post-Windrush England in a cracked narrative mirror of Hortense, Gilbert, Bernard and Queenie. The novel’s narrative cacophony serves to underscore the epistemological disruption of the official stories not only of the empire but also of white resistance within white supremacist systems. Though all the character narrators display some kind of cognitive dissonance, I focus this chapter on Queenie’s hypocritical claim to white allyship. In imagining the narratives of the black people she encounters, Queenie reveals a perception of race fueled by colonial travel narratives, orientalist images, imperial consumerism and globalized popular culture. I analyze the dissonance between Queenie’s scripting of allyship and her covert racist rhetoric, including her fetishization of the black body.
The imperial and consumerist influences are particularly visible when Queenie’s narration stands against Hortense’s and Gilbert’s, two Jamaican character-narrators who fill in the discursive gaps in Queenie’s story and whose own narratives display complex and problematic understandings of racial identity.
