Alone Together: Connecting through Estrangement in the Black British Novel

This essay examines the representation of psychological estrangement as an enabler, rather than inhibitor, of diasporic togetherness in two Black British-Caribbean diaspora novels, George Lamming’s The Emigrants and Beryl Gilroy’s In Praise of Love and Children . Both texts illustrate the condition of being “alone together,” which foregrounds the role of emotional dissociation as being, paradoxically, conducive to creating social bonds. By reworking the binaries of estrangement and relationality as complementary conditions in a diasporic context, these novels enable a reorientation and therefore expansion of typical forms and modalities of connection in diasporic spaces.