"Seeking out the Periphery" in the Shadows: Monica Ali's "In the Kitchen" and Contemporary Writing of Britain

在陰影下「找尋邊陲」：莫妮卡•阿里的《廚房》和當代英國寫作

10.6153/2012.28.4

廖培真(Pei-Chen Liao)

《廚房》 ； 移民勞工 ； 影子 ； 全球化 ； 當代英國寫作 ； "In the Kitchen" ； migrant workers ； shadow ； globalization ； contemporary writing of Britain

NTU Studies in Language and Literature

28期（2012 / 12 / 01）

87 - 115

英文

在她二○○三年刊登於《衛報》的文章〈我來自何處〉中，孟加拉裔的英國女作家莫妮卡‧阿里別富詩意地說到，作為作家，她一直在「門口的陰影下」「找尋邊陲」。本文閱讀阿里的第三本小說《廚房》（2009），藉以探討阿里在文學中找尋邊陲的努力，更進一步檢視此舉對當代英國寫作的意義。筆者認為，在《廚房》中，飯店和廚房的背景、東歐移民的角色刻畫，以及全球性產業和奴隸的主題，使得阿里的小說有別於一般傳統的英國黑人和亞裔英國寫作。在這本小說中，阿里不僅試圖擺脫弱勢族裔作家長期以來在重新定義英國性時所背負的再現的重擔，並且將焦點從族裔轉移到階級和空間定位。更確切來說，阿里超越一九四○年代晚期以來黑色英國的後殖民離散社群即已凸顯的白色英國性的問題，轉而強調英國的當代性，以及當代英國社會被漠視的下層階級和新的邊陲位置，如來自東歐和其他國家的移民勞工所居住和工作的地方。本文的第一章簡短回顧英國黑人和亞裔英國寫作的文學傳統，藉以對阿里找尋邊陲的文學努力有更完整的瞭解，尤其是她對「陰影」或「影子」的意象和概念的運用。第二、三章則聚焦於《廚房》，檢視阿里如何再現倫敦市中心的飯店和廚房的中介空間，藉以具體呈現全球化的在地衝擊，以及阿里如何將這些地點的描繪連結至影子的比喻，以便於揭露全球化的暗流與影響英國境內跨國移民勞工的肉身政治。

In her 2003 Guardian article ”Where I'm Coming from,” the Bangladeshi British woman writer Monica Ali poetically states that, as a writer, she has been ”seeking out the periphery” in ”the shadow of the doorway.” This article reads Ali's third novel ”In the Kitchen” (2009) to explore Ali's literary endeavor to seek out the periphery and to further examine its significance to contemporary writing of Britain. I argue that, in ”In the Kitchen”, the setting of the hotel and the kitchen, the Eastern European migrant characters, and the subject matter of the global sex industry and slavery distinguish Ali's writing of Britain from traditional black British and Asian British writings. In the novel, Ali not only strives to break away from the burden of representation that has long weighted on ethnic minority writers when they attempt to redefine Britishness, but she also directs the focus of attention from ethnicity to class and location. In particular, she goes beyond the questioning of white Britishness that the postcolonial diasporic communities of black Britain have long brought to the fore since the late 1940s by replacing the emphasis on the contemporaneity of Britain and on its overlooked dwelling and working places inhabited by the likewise invisible economic migrant workers from Eastern Europe and other parts of the world-the underclass and the new periphery of contemporary British society. The first section of the article briefly reviews the literary tradition of black British and Asian British writings to have a fuller understanding of Ali's literary endeavor to seek out the periphery, in particular her use of the ”shadow” as a motif. Focusing on ”In the Kitchen”, the second and third sections of the article then look into the ways that Ali represents the liminal spaces of the hotel and the kitchen in central London as the locations of globalization and the ways that she links them to the trope of the shadow to uncover the undercurrents of globalization and the corporeal politics that afflicts transnational migrant workers in contemporary Britain.

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