Facial reconstruction

Search LJMU Research Online

Browse Repository | Browse E-Theses

Leave to Remain: Bedsits, B&Bs and Borders in Contemporary Fictions of Asylum

Cuming, EM (2018) Leave to Remain: Bedsits, B&Bs and Borders in Contemporary Fictions of Asylum. In: Briganti, C and Mezei, K, (eds.) Living with Strangers: Bedsits and Boarding Houses in Modern English Life, Literature and Film. Home . Bloomsbury Academic, London, pp. 161-176. ISBN 978-1-3500-1652-1

[img]
Preview
Text
Leave to Remain Bedsits, B&Bs and Borders in Contemporary Fictions of Asylum.pdf - Accepted Version

Download (389kB) | Preview

Abstract

This chapter addresses how the bedsit, rented room and bed and breakfast accommodation return as significant settings in recent film and literature concerned with the lives of asylum seekers and forced migrants. Cuming examines representations of this setting in the light of distinct discursive shifts framing narratives of asylum and refuge in the twenty-first century. With reference to Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things (2002), Pawel Pawlikowski’s Last Resort (2000), Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea (2001) and Brian Chikwava’s Harare North (2009), Cuming explores how the depiction of the domestic spaces which mark the affective dislocation and uncertainty of characters compelled to live ‘the half-life of a stranger’ frequently resists the dominant social realism of earlier twentieth-century ‘rented room’ literature. The chapter goes on to indicate how these recent narratives of asylum, with their focus on interiority and subjectivity, might offer the promise of forms of self-definition away from, and in defiance of, these makeshift, borderland homes....

Item Type: Book Section
Additional Information: This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Bloomsbury Academic in Living with Strangers: Bedsits and Boarding Houses in Modern English Life, Literature and Film on 28 Mar 2018 available online: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350016552.ch-010
Subjects: H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform
H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races
P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General)
P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN1993 Motion Pictures
Divisions: Humanities & Social Science
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Date Deposited: 21 Apr 2017 08:54
Last Modified: 19 Dec 2023 11:33
DOI or ID number: 10.5040/9781350016552.ch-010
Editors: Briganti, C and Mezei, K
URI: https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/6273
View Item View Item