Sarah Ilott
Dr Sarah Ilott joined MMU as Lecturer in Literature and Film in November 2017. She previously taught at Teesside University (2014-17), Lancaster University (2009-14) and the University of Birmingham (2013) and she was employed as a research assistant for the AHRC-funded ‘Moving Manchester/Mediating Marginalities’ project at Lancaster University (2010-2013), a project that focused on how experiences of migration have shaped Manchester writing over the last 50 years.
Her monograph, New Postcolonial British Genres: Shifting the Boundaries, was published by Palgrave in September 2015. In this book, she identifies and explores four new genres that have evolved to suit the changing face of postcolonial Britain over the last two decades. Her main focus is on the way that notions of Britishness are challenged and rewritten in genre fiction and film that operates on the borders of mainstream literary fiction in terms of both marketability and critical attention. Her aim is to illustrate ways in which the new genres identified simultaneously challenge and reinscribe both national and generic borders by opening up to postcolonial topics, authors and contexts. She considers British Muslim Bildungsromane, Postcolonial English Gothic, Multicultural Comedy and the Urban Novel as four genres that interrogate both their generic forebears and traditions and the representations of Britishness that they are generically bound/designed to perpetuate.
Sarah co-edited a collection with Chloe Germaine Buckley entitled 'Telling it Slant: Critical Approaches to Helen Oyeyemi' (Sussex Academic Press 2017) and she has forthcoming edited collections entitled 'Comedy and the Politics of Representation: Mocking the Weak' (Palgrave 2018) and 'New Directions in Diaspora Studies' (Rowman & Littlefield 2018).
Sarah completed her BA (Hons) degree in English Literature, her MA in Contemporary Literature and her PhD in English Literature at Lancaster University. Her PhD focussed on postcolonial British genre fiction since The Satanic Verses, considering the way that notions of Britishness are challenged and rewritten in genre fiction that operates on the borders of mainstream literary fiction in terms of both marketability and critical attention. She has published articles in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Postcolonial Text and she has forthcoming book chapters in edited collections on Popular Postcolonialism and History on Screen.
Her monograph, New Postcolonial British Genres: Shifting the Boundaries, was published by Palgrave in September 2015. In this book, she identifies and explores four new genres that have evolved to suit the changing face of postcolonial Britain over the last two decades. Her main focus is on the way that notions of Britishness are challenged and rewritten in genre fiction and film that operates on the borders of mainstream literary fiction in terms of both marketability and critical attention. Her aim is to illustrate ways in which the new genres identified simultaneously challenge and reinscribe both national and generic borders by opening up to postcolonial topics, authors and contexts. She considers British Muslim Bildungsromane, Postcolonial English Gothic, Multicultural Comedy and the Urban Novel as four genres that interrogate both their generic forebears and traditions and the representations of Britishness that they are generically bound/designed to perpetuate.
Sarah co-edited a collection with Chloe Germaine Buckley entitled 'Telling it Slant: Critical Approaches to Helen Oyeyemi' (Sussex Academic Press 2017) and she has forthcoming edited collections entitled 'Comedy and the Politics of Representation: Mocking the Weak' (Palgrave 2018) and 'New Directions in Diaspora Studies' (Rowman & Littlefield 2018).
Sarah completed her BA (Hons) degree in English Literature, her MA in Contemporary Literature and her PhD in English Literature at Lancaster University. Her PhD focussed on postcolonial British genre fiction since The Satanic Verses, considering the way that notions of Britishness are challenged and rewritten in genre fiction that operates on the borders of mainstream literary fiction in terms of both marketability and critical attention. She has published articles in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Postcolonial Text and she has forthcoming book chapters in edited collections on Popular Postcolonialism and History on Screen.
less
Related Authors
InterestsView All (21)
Uploads
Books by Sarah Ilott
Papers by Sarah Ilott
Comedy operates according to a different kind of logic to both ideology and identity politics. It resists the narrative logic that would position character traits, background or ideology as central to a character’s arc and determinant of their future. Instead, moments of farce represent a narrative rupture and a loss of control that points both to the absurdity of the contemporary world, and to those who lay a claim to comprehending it. For Ramsey-Kurz, in her discussion of White Teeth, Smith’s use of comedy is tantamount to a celebration of confusion and chaos as ‘an inevitable but not necessarily deleterious corollary of cultural diversification’. Humour, for Ramsey-Kurz, becomes a political stance and an antidote to dogma. Expanding upon this idea, this chapter takes seriously Smith’s use of humour as a vehicle for understanding her social vision, with reference to her greater oeuvre. Hers is a narrative style that oscillates between being of the world it presents, lovingly attuned to its every comical detail and inconsistency, and set apart from it, observing as from a distance a world that has gone awry. I argue that whilst Smith might be Britain’s chronicler of multiculturalism, she uses humour to celebrate and critique in equal measure.
Comedy operates according to a different kind of logic to both ideology and identity politics. It resists the narrative logic that would position character traits, background or ideology as central to a character’s arc and determinant of their future. Instead, moments of farce represent a narrative rupture and a loss of control that points both to the absurdity of the contemporary world, and to those who lay a claim to comprehending it. For Ramsey-Kurz, in her discussion of White Teeth, Smith’s use of comedy is tantamount to a celebration of confusion and chaos as ‘an inevitable but not necessarily deleterious corollary of cultural diversification’. Humour, for Ramsey-Kurz, becomes a political stance and an antidote to dogma. Expanding upon this idea, this chapter takes seriously Smith’s use of humour as a vehicle for understanding her social vision, with reference to her greater oeuvre. Hers is a narrative style that oscillates between being of the world it presents, lovingly attuned to its every comical detail and inconsistency, and set apart from it, observing as from a distance a world that has gone awry. I argue that whilst Smith might be Britain’s chronicler of multiculturalism, she uses humour to celebrate and critique in equal measure.
The Icarus Girl (2005) to argue against a critical trend that reads the postcolonial Bildungsroman as
promising a positively transformed postcolonial identity. Through our reading of Oyeyemi’s novel,
we suggest that locating the debates and tropes conventionally mobilized within postcolonial
gothic in the former colonial centre complicates subject formations and constructions of alterity.
The Icarus Girl weaves together a Western literary tradition of gothic with the postcolonial
Bildungsroman and we suggest that the interaction of these forms produces a reading focused
on the abject, both in terms of physical abjection mapped onto bodies and places, and in the
way writing functions as abject supplement. When bodies, borders, and writing disintegrate,
the reading of the novel becomes a difficult process, one not easily co-opted into a critical
discourse that tends to value a psycho-symbolic reading of the postcolonial gothic Bildungsroman
and to promise a positively transformed postcolonial identity. Accordingly, we argue that The
Icarus Girl is unable to find comforting resolutions, disrupt oppositional structures, and create a
utopian hybrid space or to bring about a unified sense of self, meaning that it resists a redemptive
or cathartic ending. We draw upon Kristeva’s theories of the abject and Derrida’s notion of
the supplement in order to establish how Oyeyemi’s novel resists the construction of a stable
identity through its emphasis upon expulsion and disintegration. Unlike the majority of criticism
on postcolonial gothic, which focuses on texts emanating from formerly colonized countries, this
article considers what happens to postcolonial gothic when it is written within and about the
former colonial centre. In The Icarus Girl the repercussions of the colonial period are experienced
in the present day through experiences of racism, dislocation, and alienation within Britain.
This paper argues that David Dabydeen's Disappearance and Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching exploit their Kentish settings to reflect a broader cultural malaise associated with xenophobic fears of a threat to the national body politic in terms of intrusion of the racial Other, as Dover synechdocically comes to represent Britain at large. Both novels draw on the gothic as a genre suited to experiences of trauma, madness and alienation, as fears of foreign invasion play out in motifs of bodily abjection, disordered consumption and mental breakdown. Reflecting Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’, these novels allow feelings of liminality and uncertainty to play out. Rather than closing down or moving beyond the fears and tensions that riddle contemporary national(ist) politics, Dover gothic gives voice to and even parodies those fears, but does not imagine that it can dissolve them through the process of writing.
This paper offers an overview of the transition from such celebratory multicultural comedies to films that expose Britain’s hypocritical and spectacularly inconsistent multicultural politics as a richer source of comic material. These incredibly comic films (Ali G Indahouse, Four Lions, Attack the Block) undermine comedy’s generic convention of providing a happy and mutually satisfying ending for all of the characters and in doing so refuse to offer comic appeasement as a solution to social problems. They are engaged with characters frequently excluded by benign representations of multicultural Britain, eschewing political correctness but facing the problems inherent in constructions of multicultural Britain head-on. In my reading of the films I suggest ways in which we can take comedy seriously and make a considered judgement regarding the timeliness of what we are being positioned to laugh at.
In the novel bodily borders are transgressed through sexual relationships frequently described in terms of food and consumption. Though this is initially marked as deviant, I will argue that the narrative serves to challenge and undermine such constructions of monstrosity. Kristen Guest suggests that taboos surrounding cannibalism arise due to ‘recognition of corporeal similarity,’ which ‘activates our horror of consuming others like ourselves’ based on the assumption of a ‘shared humanness of cannibals and their victims’ (2003). However, White is for Witching operates on the construction of Otherness, with a plot driven by racist attacks, BNP pamphleting and an all-too-human hotel that tortures and expels indigestible foreign bodies. This paper argues, therefore, that the sexual and gastronomic desires expressed towards each other by the two female protagonists (white Miranda and black Ore) are transgressive precisely for their suggestion of a shared humanity that the overtly racist Britain of the novel refuses to recognise. By literalising the language of consumption that is shared by multicultural and racist rhetoric alike, the novel foregrounds and mocks fears of broken borders.
This paper examines Tamar Heller and Patricia Moran’s claim that ‘appetite can function as a form of voice’ (2003) as modes of consumption participate in discourses surrounding national identity, the construction of monstrosity and taboo. The soucouyant’s threat – consumption or assimilation – mimics nationalist agendas and the ‘choice’ offered to British immigrants. Yet the ultimately ambiguous identity of the soucouyant ensures that monstrosity is not simply reversed, creating an alternative hierarchy of Othering.
In the course of the paper I will contrast models of psychotherapy, looking at traditionally Western models that are based on the reclamation of narrative control for cathartic effect, as well as more pragmatic (or postcolonial) models that see trauma in socio-political terms, meaning that recovery must entail physical reparations. Gothic is a useful point of entry when considering British identity, as it brings to the forefront structures of fear that have gone into the shaping of the nation. As such, through a consideration of the ostentatious Gothic tropes employed in the novels, I will aim to establish why traumatic histories are recalled or created in order to allow a sense of personal or national identity to flourish.