In progress
Beyond Melting Pot, Salad Bowl and Kaleidoscope: British Postmigrant Literatures and Cultures
My current research project, funded by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, studies the experiences of British postmigrants: individuals born or raised in Britain with descent from different cultures. I am discussing fiction about postmigration by authors including Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali, Kamila Shamsie, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Caryl Phillips, among others. I am also conducting interviews exploring which aspects of the culture of descent are preserved through generations, and which elements are adapted or discarded. So far I have carried out eighty two interviews with individuals of Indian, Sri Lankan, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Iranian, Turkish, Kurdish, Jewish, Syrian, Cypriot, Palestinian, Lebanese, Egyptian, East-African-Asian, Mauritian, Trinidadian, Jamaican, St Lucian, Sudanese, Somali, Ghanaian, Eritrean, Congolese and Nigerian descent. I plan to produce an academic monograph on this research.
In preparation
The Level Game: Architectures of Play in American Fiction from Funhouse to Candy House
From shopping centres to car parks to video games, many features of contemporary society are organised in terms of levels. Levels structure the spaces we navigate, providing a means of identifying our relative location, whether in virtual environments (progress in a game) or physical surroundings (position in a building). In a society of mass media, attention is also drawn to levels of reality, as manifested by a particular engagement with metafiction in American literature from the mid-twentieth century onwards. My book examines how levels operate in American fiction from John Barth’s funhouse metaphor in 1968 to Jennifer Egan’s Candy House in 2022. Probing the relationship between levels and play, I consider physical and metaphysical manifestations of such structures, including narrative levels in metafiction, material levels in architecture, and digital levels in games.
This book is currently being prepared for submission to a publisher.
Chapter titles:
Slides, Staircases and Mirror Mazes: Navigating the Funhouse of Fiction
From Magic Circle to Mise en Abyme: Infinite Jest and the Play Within the Play
The Gamification of the Ghetto: Reading Between the Levels in Percival Everett’s Erasure
Architectures of Paper in House of Leaves and Tree of Codes
‘From One World to Another, like that!’: Ontological Orientation in Jennifer Egan’s novels
Power Dynamics of Digital Play in Plowing the Dark, God Jr. and The Circle
The Level and the Network: Apocalyptic Endgames in Underworld, The Overstory and Zero K