July's People: Adoption and Kinship in Andrea Levy's Fiction

This essay sees Andrea Levy's prolonged preoccupation with matters of family, kinship, and adoption as central to her literary articulation race, empire, slavery. It explores how Levy presents the colonial legacies that have entangled Britain Jamaica distinctly bodily affairs impact upon kinship family-making argues representation these histories is part firm attempt expose centrality colonialism slavery constitution both Britons. Yet in pursuing this vital politically urgent task, risks upholding synchronisation corporis cultura—the body its historical cultivation—essential modernity's exalting "blood cultures" assume sanguinary transfusion cultural particulars within itself. risk can be sighted particularly transracial appropriation rhetoric "illegitimate" kinship. With particular reference The Long Song (2010), considers invaluable attention history forced adoptions at heart slavery's brutality problematised by adoption's figurative requisitioning for wider (well-intentioned) critical purposes. Ultimately, claims laudable mission does not always exert sustained pressure on biocentric norms imagination.