Afterlives, Aftermaths: Levy Studies in the Twenty-First Century

Andrea was never more visible than in the moment she left us.

Gary Younge, "After a Life of Striving"

I. Introduction: The Arrival of Levy Studies

In his Guardian eulogy for the award-winning writer Andrea Levy, journalist and academic Gary Younge pays tribute to the indelible ways in which Levy transformed the cultural and aesthetic landscape of contemporary writing in Britain. Younge recounts his deeply personal relationship with Levy by recalling the nature of their connection: "We shared a sense of humour—raucous, playful and occasionally bizarre—and a politics that was rooted in anti-racism, equality and internationalism." This worldly, insurgent, and irreverent sensibility shared between Younge and Levy frames an intimate eulogy that not only accounts for a remarkable life but also lays bare the longstanding political impetus of Levy's work and thinking. "Fiction," Levy once stated, "could be one of the most powerful political weapons you can have in your armory" ("Interview" 261). As Younge notes in his foreword to this special issue, Levy told him something very similar: that, through fiction, "you can take on the world" (5). From her novels, short stories, essays, and unpublished projects to the multitudinous and continued adaptations of her writing—in the form of audiobooks, radio performances, and productions for the stage and the screen—Levy's aesthetic armory powerfully demonstrates the profound entanglement between politics and the imagination. Attuned to the deep-seated and interminable legacies of empire, transatlantic slavery, and migration, her creative output has always distinguished her as a writer dedicated to exploring the devastating aftermath of imperial history while attending to the ways in which art might nurture new, more equitable ways of imagining the world. In the wake of her passing, this special issue considers Levy's legacy from the purview of the contemporary and explores the ways in which her rebellious writing remains startlingly, even disturbingly, relevant. In a political climate that has heightened the nativist impulses behind Britain's decision to leave the European Union, exposed an attendant history of antagonistic immigration policies through the catastrophe of the Windrush scandal, and intensified the continued demonization of migrants, refugees, and the "undocumented" around the world, we explore the lasting political imperative of Levy's complex aesthetic vision. To extend Younge's poignant reflection, this special issue argues that Levy's writing, published and unpublished, and in all its proliferating genres and afterlives, has not only become more visible but has never been more urgent.

The exigency of Levy's writing has made her work both unceasingly timely yet also untimely—even transcendent—in its critical engagement with the grand narratives of imperial history. As Maya Jaggi poignantly notes, those artists who appear "ahead of their time" (3) or "prescient … are close readers of history—history that is always at risk of distortion" (7). Drawing from Jaggi's characterization of prescient art, we suggest that the urgency of Levy's writing resides in how her viscerally affecting and boundary-crossing craft is shaped by the distinctive historicity of her work. That both her fiction and nonfiction, in print, audio, and audio-visual formats, speak to immediate social and political issues surrounding, for instance, curricular decolonization, representations of imperial nostalgia, and protest movements advocating for social justice such as Black Lives Matter, should come as no surprise. Levy's erudite rendering of the variegated histories of slavery, empire, and white supremacy—histories that are often only selectively remembered, co-opted, or in danger of censure from conservative attitudes that regard them as dangerously "woke"—forges an aesthetics that exposes the absurd logic of inequalities across the spectrums of race, class, gender, and cultural circumstance. Levy's oeuvre continues to proliferate after her passing, particularly through adaptations of her writing alongside an archive that is housed at the British Library (BL) in London and that contains unpublished material. As such, an accelerated form of canonization is developing, which marks the way in which her creative articulation of the past distinguishes her enduring prescience. Levy's texts are becoming, in...