Culture& work in the modern world Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Culture& work in the modern world - Essay Example In the book The Lonely Londoners by Samuel Selvon, a story of West Indian migrants is told where the issues of acculturation are explored. Coming to London is seen as a move towards opportunity. One of the people in the book, Moses, holds a transitional role for the other from his culture. He helps migrants from West India as they try to learn how to function within their new environment. Selvon states â€Å"And so like a welfare officer, Moses scattered the boys around London† (25). The purpose of spreading them throughout the city was so that acculturation could be better achieved and so they would not congregate in such a way as to create an ethno-centric population that could cause problems in relationships between the many cultures that are in London. Moses has described this world of London for its varieties of cultures as it â€Å"divide up in little worlds, and you stay in the world where you belong to and you don't know anything about what happening in the other ones except what you read in the papers† (Selvon 60). ... Through the opportunities that exist in a large city within a successful, Western country, an attraction occurs to those who live in places that do not have the same level of opportunity. After World War II, the colonized nations under British rule who had sent men to fight the war found an opportunity waiting for them at the end of the service as they discovered that Britain considered the people to be citizens of their society, thus allowing them to freely move to London, if that is what they wished. Jamaica, a country that has seen a great deal of hardship, found that many of her citizens were willing to move to England to take advantage of whatever opportunities they could find there. The novel, Small Island by Andrea Levy follows the lives of four people as they navigate issues of multi-ethnic acculturation during the aftermath of World War II. The nature of a city in which the many different culture collide, changing one another and developing something new in each incarnation is explored through the tales of four people who intersect during that time period. Queenie, a character from the book by Levy, begins the story with a tale from her childhood. She states â€Å"I thought I’d been to Africa† (Levy 1). This story that she relates as it reveals an episode in her life where there had been an exhibition within Britain that provided for the recreation of the countries of the world so that as you turned each corner you felt you were experiencing another culture. She thought she had actually been to Africa, the nature of the culture impacting her in such a way as she read it as a state of existence rather than as a geographic place. This understanding of how a culture is not a geographic location