‘Is Who Send We Up In This Place?’ Threshold Paralysis and Postponed Arrivals in Sam Selvon’s Lonely Londoners and George Lamming’s The Emigrants

The Literary London Journal, Volume 13 Number 1 (Spring 2016) Abstract: The article demonstrates how arrival in London is depicted in Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) and George Lamming’s The Emigrants (1954) as elusive or postponed. Using spatial theories put forward by Jacques Derrida, Michel de Certeau and the 1960s radical thinkers the Situationists, the article focuses on the concept of dérive and the threshold in both texts. It demonstrates that initially, as the English controlled the conditions of hospitality, Lamming and Selvon’s protagonists are unable to traverse spatial and cultural thresholds and embrace their citizenship in London, which leads to a profound sense of loss. Using the central concept of dérive, or drifting, as defined by Derrida and the Situationists, the article then traces the divergent trajectories of Selvon and Lamming’s protagonists, arguing that in The Lonely Londoners we see a movement away from this state of paralysis at the threshold towards limited but creative, playful and subversive movement, while in Lamming’s text the emigrants struggle to find ways of redefining the dominant order. Keywords: Caribbean Literature, Migration, London, Jacques Derrida, dérive, Michel de Certeau, The Situationists, Windrush, British Colonialism

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