“Give Me a Map”: Spatial Anxiety and Literary Cartography in Andrea Levy’s Small Island

The Windrush generation’s migration to postwar Britain exposes a fundamental tension between the imperial promise of British citizenship and the racialized exclusion of Black migrants from urban space and national belonging, a dynamic permeating Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004). This paper employs Robert T. Tally Jr.’s theories of topophrenia and literary cartography to analyze how Andrea Levy presents the complex spatial anxiety of the Windrush generation immigrants in Small Island. I argue that the novel, by tracing the characters’ affective journey from imperial fantasy and colonial disillusionment to tentative, self-fashioned belonging, reveals both how geographical experience profoundly shapes their diasporic identity, and completes an important literary cartographic practice. Levy thus combines the unique sense of place with her critical vision of Englishness, suggesting that belonging for the Windrush generation is neither a simple assimilation nor an outright defeat, but a contested, self-fashioned mode of dwelling forged in the very enclaves of postwar London. Therefore, Small Island is not only a historical novel but also a prophetic narrative that actively interrogates the reconstruction of British identity in the postwar era.