Masaryk University Faculty of Arts
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Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Bc. Radka Koprdová Comparison of Caribbean and Chinese Experience in England in the Second Half of the 20th century Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A. 2012 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Author’s signature Acknowledgement I would like to express my thanks to my supervisor prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A., for her helpful guidance and valuable advice provided to me during my work on this thesis.
Introduction 4 Sociological Background 6 Caryl Phillips and Timothy Mo, Authors with Migration Background 19 Comparison by Topics 26 Conclusion 52 Bibliography 54 Resumé 57 IntroductionThe thesis deals with the situation of Caribbean and Chinese immigrants in England in the second half of the 20th century depicted in the novels by two contemporary authors with migration background, Caryl Phillips and Timothy Mo. It compares and contrasts the ways the main protagonists of Phillips’s Final Passage and Mo’s Sour Sweet put up with white racism, discrimination and the process of adaptation. Although Mo illustrates the life of Cantonese immigrants who come from the New Territories in Hong Kong, the thesis regards them as the Chinese, since they descended from a South Chinese province and their language and culture are varieties of Chinese ones. As Caribbean and Cantonese immigrants originate from completely different parts of the world and, on the one hand, are representative of distinct cultures, but on the other hand, both were under the rule of the British Commonwealth, I would like to explore the experience the two minorities went through in England in the 1960s. Accordingly, the main focus of the thesis is to analyse the situation of the two immigrant groups in England, the country where they wanted to make a new beginning but had to face a lot of obstacles instead. The work intends to observe and contrast the way both the groups were discriminated against and the way they did or did not integrate into English society from their points of view. Regarding social history of post-war Britain and related migration from the New Commonwealth countries, I concentrate on explaining the sociological background of the thesis topic. In the following chapters, I comment on the authors and their migration experience and provide synopses of the two novels with the focus on the events showing the difficulties which the main characters as immigrants had to cope with. Subsequently, I take into account the viewpoint of immigrants and proceed to step by step comparison of the situation of Caribbean and Chinese minorities, so that their cultures and ways of thinking and acting throughout the novels can be better understood. The comparison chapters contrast them by means of their cultural backgrounds, reasons for migration, their position after the arrival in England, language and language barrier, the importance of community, discrimination and the process of adaptation and integration into white society. Finally, I summarize the outcome of the comparison and reason the conclusion. What I intend to point out is that though Chinese and Caribbean immigrants were both regarded as coloured, non-white persons, the discrimination against the Chinese was not so severe as it was against the black immigrants. Their powerful cultural heritage and sense of identity protected them against the dominant influences of their new surroundings, to which Caribbean people were vulnerable because they lacked the sense of their own cultural identity. Sociological BackgroundThe situation in post-war Britain, especially the expanding economy and the need for new labour force stimulated immigration from the New Commonwealth countries in Caribbean and Asian regions. But was Britain prepared to deal with such an exodus to the mother country and all the issues it brought about? Were British citizens disposed to accept immigrants, who were treated by the press as “large numbers of people [...] pouring into the country and making it overcrowded” (Abercrombie 247)? And more importantly, were the immigrants able to withstand racism and discrimination stemming from racial prejudices? As a matter of fact, Britain was “subject to successive waves of incomers of diverse origin in earlier centuries” and became an immigrant society that had to deal with ethnic inequalities (245). Inequalities between the British white population and ethnic minorities, and integration of black immigrants into British society came to be the major issues. Immigrants, strangers by virtue of their colour and culture, found themselves confronted with hostility and intolerance of the confused and insecure host society. Its stability was disturbed and would be restored only when the immigrants adapted to British society and the white population accepted them (245-46). Marwick argues that Britain was still a class society in the 1960s: “Regularly throughout the sixties interviews and opinion polls showed that well over 90 per cent of population recognized the existence of classes.” Class boundaries were well present and thus 67 per cent identified themselves as working-class, 29 per cent as middle-class and only 1 per cent as upper-class, the others allocated themselves to somewhere between (154). Nevertheless, it was not the class differences, but skin colour that became a powerful cause of inequality and constituted a significant divide in the British society. Accordingly, discriminatory and prejudicial attitudes of the white population caused coloured immigrants to experience lots of difficulties with the process of adaptation. Abercrombie raises the question whether it is the nature of the British class structure or that of white racism that is explanatory of the racial disadvantage immigrants had to face. “Black immigrants [had] jobs that tend[ed] to place them at the bottom [of the class hierarchy]” (257). Their own culture and native language also separated them out from the white community. There was a belief that this could be prevented by means of education that enabled the children of immigrants to acquire British cultural values and gradually assimilate (257). As for white racism, it kept them at the bottom and separated from the white society as well. In this view, the educational system did not recognize their cultural distinctiveness and white teachers labelled black children as educational failures (258-59). British society was clearly racist, “the British way of life [was] thought to be best and the ways of foreigners, inexplicable” (259). Since Britain had been an imperial and colonial power, the supposedly superior British treated black people as inferior beings, they were used to reacting to them in this way. The British benefited [...] from lordship over large numbers of people in many different countries, most of whom were black. [They] have learnt to identify blackness of skin with inferiority, strangeness, and allegedly repellent religious and cultural practices (259). According to a study carried out in 1984, more than one-third of the British sample still described themselves as racially prejudiced (260). What was it like to start a new life in the UK in the 1960s, when racism and prejudices were strongly rooted and persisting at least till the mid 1980s? Many black people faced physical assault or violent verbal expressions of racial hatred on a daily basis. Coloured immigrants were concentrated in “declining and low-wage industries, work[ed] unsocial hours for low wages, [had] poor promotion prospects” and were vulnerable to unemployment (261). In regard to housing, “at least one-third of landlords discriminate[d] against ethnic minorities on grounds of skin colour.” They were also discriminated against in terms of allocation of council housing (263). The police were also openly racist and all these factors suggest that racism and discriminatory practices were so widespread that they were institutionalized (265). Not only were immigrants placed at the bottom of the class hierarchy, Abercrombie suggests that they formed an underclass (265). He refers to Rex and Tomlinson’s study from 1979 that concludes that since ethnic minorities were not absorbed into the white working class and were not likely to become so, they formed “an underclass, a class beneath the white working class, disadvantaged by jobs, housing, and education” (266). As it was already mentioned, Britain’s imperial past and the exploitation of its colonies reinforced the assumption that black people were inferior. The effects of colonialism on West Indians, black people of African origin living in the Caribbean, who were sold into slavery about 200 hundred years ago and separated from their African culture, were that they had “fewer cultural resources with which to resist the forces that place them in the underclass” (266). The consequence of disadvantaging ethnic minorities both by the mechanisms of the British class structure and white racism is an ambivalent attitude to them. “The white population need[ed] them to work while [...] their presence [was] resented” (265). Download 140.31 Kb. Share with your friends:
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