Context — Anita and Me — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Context
Introduction
What you need to know
The contexts of Anita and Me: Meera Syal's childhood as the daughter of Punjabi parents in a Black Country mining village, the Partition of India in 1947 and the migration that followed,
Enoch Powell's 1968 speech and the Race Relations Acts, the Black Country and its dialect, and village life in the early 1970s, from closing pits to a planned motorway.
How to use context in the comparison: the situations the two passages and their introductions reveal, such as family, culture, age and class.
Meera Syal (born 1961): the daughter of Punjabi parents from Delhi who settled in Wolverhampton, she grew up as the only 'person of colour' in the mining village of Essington and has said that 'Right from the off I was an outsider'.
A semi-autobiographical first novel, published in 1996, which won a Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize, and Syal's own memory of being 'a Midlands wench outside the house' and 'a good Indian girl at home'.
The Partition of India in 1947: British India divided into India and Pakistan, the Punjab split between them, about a million deaths and millions displaced, the stories of it Meena hears from her parents and their friends, and Syal's father, who lived through it at 13.
Migration after the Second World War: the British Nationality Act of 1948, workers recruited to the factories and foundries of the West Midlands, and the tighter immigration laws of 1962, 1968 and 1971.
Enoch Powell, MP for Wolverhampton, whose 1968 speech in Birmingham warned against immigration and left many non-white Britons feeling threatened; in the novel Papa and the uncles answer 'If he wants to send us back' with defiance.
The Race Relations Acts of 1965 and 1968, which outlawed racial discrimination in public places and then in housing, jobs and services, set against the casual racism of Meena's world.
The Black Country: coal, foundries and canals, the decline of mining and the pit strikes of 1974, and a dialect of its own, with words such as 'wench', 'yow' and 'bostin'.
Village life in the early 1970s, the era of 'flares, power cuts, glam rock, decimalisation and Ted Heath', and the grammar schools entered by passing the eleven-plus.
Using context in the comparison: what the two passages and their introductions show about family, culture, age and class, rather than background learned about the novel; in the other moment, context counts only where it explains the text.
In OCR's exam, this background earns no marks of its own: part (a) credits the context you can infer from the two printed extracts and their introductions, and part (b) doesn't mark context. Know it to understand the text, and use it in an answer only where it explains a reading.
Quotations are short phrases of a few words, the way you would learn them for a closed-book exam.
OCR's question on this text has two parts on the same text. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a printed extract from it with an unseen extract of the same genre, and weights your response (AO1) and context (AO3) twice as heavily as language analysis (AO2), where context means the social and cultural situations you can infer from the two extracts and their introductions; an answer on only one of the two extracts cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores another moment in the same text from memory, with response and analysis of language, form and structure (AO1 and AO2) equally weighted and no marks for context. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
