Samuel Selvon's shadow in Stuart Hall's discourse and the intertextuality in the works of Hall and Selvon : who influenced whom?

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to acknowledge an intertextuality in the London novels of Trinidadian writer Samuel Dickson Selvon, better known as Sam Selvon, and the cultural identity theories of Jamaican theorist Stuart Hall. Selvon's London novels dealt with themes of exile in the areas of race, identity, and discrimination from the 1950s to 1970s in the United Kingdom. Who influenced whom and how? If there is such a connection, what is the breadth and depth of that influence in the works of Stuart Hall? Whose narrative influenced whom? What is the significance of those influential factors? My theoretical approach is the intertextuality theory as a completion of an act of interpretation in the works of Hall and Selvon. The theoretical framework will include the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Louis Althusser, and Antonio Gramsci. Althusser and Gramsci influenced Stuart Hall in his ideas reflected in the Stuart Hall Project, a film made in 2013 about cultural theorist Stuart Hall's career and the twentieth century global political and cultural changes. Another thinker that was part of Hall's education was Mikhail Bakhtin, who in his dialogism says that "everything anybody ever says always exists in response to things that had been said before and in anticipation of things that will be said in response". In other words, referring to literature, the dialogic work carries on a continual dialogue with other works of literature and other authors. Up to the present, there are no arguments that defend or reject the validity of my position of intertextuality and the influence in Fall and Selvon's works. I would like to intertwine Hall's ideas and theories with the plot and literary criticism of Sam Selvon's work. Selvon wrote about the people that surroundend him and their struggles in the Britain of 1950s to 1970s. Hall and Selvon knew first hand immigrants' struggles in London and they fought discrimination in different ways. Selvon used works of fiction with humor and irony, while Hall used radio and television and other artistic media to become an intellectual of mass culture. They both were voices of the silent immigrants and the defenders of that minority group that hardly survived in 1950s London. The immigrants' struggles became their struggles as they were fought in Selvon's novels and in Stuart Hall's TV shows . Under a critical perspective approach, this work analyzes Sam Selvon's fiction, specifically: The Lonely Londoners (1956), Ways of Sunlight (1957), The Housing Lark (1965), and Moses Ascending (1975); and the works of Stuart Hall: Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (1978), Stuart Hall Project (2013), and Familiar Stranger (2017).