'Where the city dissolves': suburban diasporas, psychosis and reparative writing

This chapter examines two recent literary works - Tim Lott‘s 1996 memoir The Scent of Dried Roses and Bhanu Kapil‘s experimental work, published in 2015, Ban en Banlieue - that examine mental illness in the context of histories of migration to London suburbs. Focusing on Southall in West London, each text develops a reparative mode of writing that attends closely to the historical and material processes that have shaped suburban lives but renders suspect both conventional autobiographical narrative and comprehensive forms of analysis.