Multiculturalism in a selection of English and Spanish fiction and artworks

Abstract

Discourses of cultural pluralism in literature, cinema and art today prove that inter-ethnic relations in Europe are moving towards, and in some spaces have already achieved, a spontaneous conviviality, in spite of the presence of racism and social injustice. Though the focus will be on the long-standing British multicultural experience, attention will also be paid to the case of Spain, a much younger country of migration. The specific histories of migration of these countries will also be tackled.Migration, diasporic or transcultural processes which have conditioned the lives of millions of people in Europe have made it almost impossible to connect their identity to a specific and unitary location. In this context, the question 'who am I?' needs to be asked not only in connection to one's roots, which are often found in different continents, but also in relation to one's routes. The postmodern celebration of movement, travel, and rootlessness as alternative processes of identity formation has opened up unending possibilities for the de/construction of old subjectivities, once defined in relation to national and cultural attachments which no longer prove stable and valid. Likewise, the capacity of many individuals to develop a sense of identity precisely because of not being linked to a specific location or because several places serve them simultaneously as points of reference has proved a useful tool for the recognition of hybrid identities and cultural formations developed in this large contact zone which Europe has become. Quoting Rosi Braidotti (1994), Suárez Lafuente highlights, in La historia espacial en la novela inglesa contemporánea [The history of space in the contemporary English novel] (2007), 'that the nomadic subject is formed by various axes becoming a narrative entity and a political recreation who can surpass different categories and levels of experience diluting, at the same time, the limits of difference without burning the norm' (2007, p. 192). Critical theory and literature become the natural space where the nomadic subject becomes an entity who un/identifies itself in order to be identified. This allows the nomadic subject to negotiate all the possible norms of social implementation of these new positions of the postmodern subject. As Suárez Lafuente also argues, it was Zygmunt Baumann