July’s People: Adoption and Kinship in Andrea Levy's Fiction

Abstract

This essay considers Andrea Levy’s prolonged preoccupation with matters of family, kinship, and adoption as central to her literary articulation of race, empire, and slavery.  It explores how Levy presents as a distinctly bodily affair the colonial legacies that have entangled Britain and Jamaica and impacted upon kinship and family-making, as part of her firm attempt transgressively to expose the centrality of colonialism and slavery to the constitution of both Britain and Britons.  Yet in pursuing this vital and politically urgent task, Levy risks upholding the synchronisation of corporis and cultura – the body and its historical cultivation – essential to colonial modernity’s “blood cultures” that believe in the sanguinary transfusion of historical and cultural particulars.  This risk can be sighted particularly in Levy’s representation of transracial adoption and her appropriation of the rhetoric of “illegitimate” kinship.  With particular reference to The Long Song (2010), the essay considers how Levy’s highly valuable attention to the history of forced adoptions at the heart of slavery’s brutality is problematised by its figurative requisitioning for wider well-intentioned critical purposes.  Ultimately, it is claimed, Levy’s laudable literary mission does not always put under sustained pressure the biocentric norms of colonial modernity’s sanguinary imagination.