Department of English

“London Is The Place For Me” is the title of a calypso by Lord Kitchener, an ode written and recorded in 1948 shortly after his arrival to England by way of the Empire Windrush. It captures the spirit of an entire generation of newly arrived West Indians, who continue to transform British culture and identity into the present day. Sam Selvon’s 1956 fiction, The Lonely Londoners, is the quintessential novel of the Windrush Generation. He tells his narrative like a calypsonian to depict the everyday and existential struggles of working class Black Britons in midcentury London. This paper looks at Selvon’s masterpiece in three ways: as a calypso, as a work of West Indian literature, and as an experiment in language. Informed by Anglophone Caribbean literary criticism and the cultural theories of Stuart Hall, the thesis considers The Lonely Londoners as an exercise in cultural hybridity which consciously articulates the complications and problems of nationality and identity. With its notable use of language, lack of cohesive structure, Caribbean influences, and English concerns, Selvon challenges readers to locate the novel’s identity in what Hall defines as différance—the mode of analysis which emphasizes the evolving differences of cultural production over the satisfaction of a straightforward cultural product. Therefore, The Lonely Londoners reads like an uncommonly modern text because it continues to inspire novel interpretations of the postcolonial world.