SHIFTING “LIMITS OF TOLERANCE AND BELONGING” IN ANDREA LEVY’S FICTION: AN ENCOUNTER WITH THE REFUGEE IN “LOOSE CHANGE”
SHIFTING “LIMITS OF TOLERANCE AND BELONGING” IN ANDREA LEVY’S FICTION: AN ENCOUNTER WITH THE REFUGEE IN “LOOSE CHANGE”

Summary/Abstract: Andrea Levy’s short story “Loose Change” (2014) focuses on an unsettling encounter between the narrator, a black British woman, who identifies herself as a “Londoner,” and a homeless refugee woman, Laylor, from Uzbekistan. It is my claim that the unsympathetic attitude of the narrator to a refugee woman in need of help is indicative of the text’s emphasis on “relational” and “historically variable” positioning of diasporic formations (Brah, 1996, p. 180) and of Levy’s brave tackling of the following question raised by Alison Donnell: “Does the success that writers and other cultural practitioners have had in ensuring that the black in black Britishness has now arrived at a point of much fuller and complex self-representation, mean that black writers no longer need to contest the nation?” (Donnell, 2002, p. 17). In “Loose Change,” Levy continues with contesting the nation, yet this time her emphasis falls upon “a new group of people in Britain that seem to mark the limits of tolerance and belonging, the threshold between in and out” (Donnell, 2002, p. 17); i.e. the refugee.

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