(In)visible boundaries in Monica Ali’s Banglatown : an urban representation of Brick Lane, London E1

The aim of this paper is to investigate the cohabitation of both visible and invisible boundaries in a specific area of London, that is Brick Lane and its surroundings. Starting from factual experience projected into fiction and concluding remapping all traces proposed in Ali’s novel , this paper wants to show how a fictional representation of the city is rooted in reality and how it cooperates in shaping the actual (ghost) cityscape through the eyes of Nazneen, Brick Lane’s female main character. As a matter of fact, in her début work Brick Lane, Monica Ali describes her readers not only a peculiar part of the UK capital city through the point of view of her young protagonist, but also a socially constructed reality that is Banglatown, the ghost Bangladeshi city within London East End. Reality and fiction interact to draw a net of concrete borders and mock edges, thick curtains and filters to be studied through the magnifying glass of cultural studies, gender and ethnicity.