윈드러쉬 세대와 ‘집’의 정치학—샘 셀본의 『모세 출세하다』와 『모세 이주하다』

Abstract

Responding to Kureishi's call for “a fresh way of seeing Britain,” this essay analyzes the reconceptualization of home(land) by the Windrush generation in Sam Selvon's Moses Ascending (1975) and Moses Migrating (1983). Moses, narrator and protagonist in both novels, is a whitewashed black immigrant from Trinidad, who has come to London in the 1950s like many other West Indian immigrants known as the Windrush generation. Moses Ascending begins as a success story of a black immigrant who becomes a landlord of a dilapidated London house, ensconces himself in the highest flat, and hires a white man Friday as a servant. As the story unfolds, however, Moses's house becomes a site where hierarchical binaries of white vs. black, master vs. servant, landlord vs. tenant, and native vs. immigrant are collapsed through a series of “comic reversals.” The ongoing reorganization of Moses's house questions the racist logic behind post-1962 immigration policies and racial attacks on black immigrants. Furthermore, in Moses Migrating set in Trinidad during the Carnival season, Selvon satirizes Moses's misled identification with the ‘mother country' and mocks the idea of keeping Britain white. Read together, Moses Ascending and Moses Migrating challenge the narrow and inaccurate definition of Britain as white people's home(land).