Abstract
This chapter addresses the underappreciated literary innovation of contemporary Britain’s black women writers, who, like women experimentalists in the twentieth century, have been underrepresented in both studies focused on innovative writing and women’s literature, despite their rising profiles, both nationally and internationally. With its emphasis on aesthetics, it refocuses the more common critical assessments of lack British women’s literature, which are concerned predominantly with the authors’ thematic commitment to issues of gender, ethnicity and race. Rather than simply read the texts as ‘ethnographical’ or sociopolitical, this chapter pays tribute to the willingness to innovate that permeates much writing by black British women in the twenty-first century, as is illustrated by their penchant for such strategies as linguistic experimentation, hybrid cross-genre writing, intertextuality and metafiction, for which they draw on diverse heritages, including myth, literature and history from Africa, the Caribbean and Europe. Through a preamble overview of these and other innovative strategies across a range of authors and a more extensive case study of Helen Oyeyemi, whose work is clearly situated at the vanguard of innovation in black British women’s writing, this chapter argues that acknowledging the breadth and depth of black British women writers’ formal and generic experimentations is a crucial act of reclamation and political activism.
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Notes
- 1.
The first anthology showcasing Black British Women’s Writing was published in the late 1980s (Cobham and Collins 1987), with a ten-year gap before literary criticism followed. Among the earliest contributions on black British women’s literature are Niesen de Abruña in Werlock (2000); Wisker (2000, 2004); Lima (2004); Weedon (2008, 2009), with some studies including also British authors of Asian descent. In 2009 Deirdre Osborne edited the first special issue exclusively devoted to black British women’s writing (Women: A Cultural Review 20.3).
- 2.
Writers of colour (including black British women writers) are overlooked in such collections and monographs on experimental women’s writing as Friedman and Fuchs (1989); Loeffelholz (1992); Freitag (2006); Kennedy and Kennedy (2013); Mitchell (2015). However , the edited collection of Parker and Young (2013) on ‘experience and experimentation in women’s writing’ includes Zadie Smith among a wide range of authors of different ethnicities and sociocultural backgrounds, even if most essays do not focus on the writers’ formal experimentation, while Berry (2016) takes Korean American author Theresa Hak Kyung Cha as one of her six case studies.
- 3.
While some book-length studies on British experimental literature focus on the period preceding the rise of black women’s literature in Britain (e.g. Bluemel 2010; Booth 2012; Clarke 2015), black British (women) writers are not included either in such comprehensive discussions of experimental literature as The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (ed. Bray et al. 2012), Armstrong’s overview of experimental fiction (2014) or Reed’s volume on black (American and Caribbean) experimental writing (2014). The Routledge Companion’s only contribution on women’s writing (Friedman 2012) discusses American authors of colour (Toni Morrison and Bharati Mukherjee) alongside pioneering white British women such as Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf, but no black British authors; the companion’s only chapter specifically devoted to avant-garde authors of colour (Nielsen 2012) is devoted exclusively to African-American writers and focuses on the male poets Melvin. B. Tolson and Lorenzo Thomas, with cursory references to some of their female colleagues. Notable exceptions are Onega & Ganteau’s The Ethical Component in Experimental British Fiction since the 1960s (2007) and Noland & Watten’s Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement (2009), which respectively contain articles on the experimental writing of Zadie Smith (Sell 2007) and black British poetry (Ramey 2009). Other books devoted to more peripheral manifestations of avant-garde literature (and other forms of culture) (e.g. Vincent 2012; Bäckström and Hjartarson 2014) do not include any black British women writers.
- 4.
The sociopolitical engagement of male and female authors is central to such monographs on (predominantly) Black British Literature as Sommer (2001); Sandhu (2003); Stein (2004); McLeod (2004); Ellis (2007); Gunning (2010); Pirker (2011); Laursen (2012). While these and other studies generally do comment on the literary techniques the authors employ to raise their political concerns, the literature’s (black) aesthetics rarely takes priority. A case in point is R. Victoria Arana’s editorial introduction in ‘Black’ British Aesthetics Today (2007), whose description of the ‘black’ British aesthetics references the texts’ political agendas rather than their formal features, save for her addition that the former (significantly described as ‘artistic ends’) are best accomplished ‘through a friendly sort of satire’ or works that are ‘full of subtle wit and good humour’ (2007a, 4). Nevertheless, Arana’s volume (2007b) and a special issue of Woman: A Cultural Review (2009) edited by Deirdre Osborne both include contributions that discuss experimental writing by women, such as Lauri Ramey’s ‘Situating a ‘Black’ British Poetic Avant-Garde’ and Roy Sommer’s illustration of the aesthetic turn in black literary studies through Zadie Smith’s On Beauty in the former and articles considering fragmentation and polyphony (e.g. Lynette Goddard on debbie tucker green) or intertextuality (Nicole King on Zadie Smith) as experimental attributes of the works discussed. More sustained attention is given to (genre) innovation in the book-length studies Fictions of Migration (2001) by Roy Sommer and Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation (2004) by Mark Stein, but emphasis remains on the thematic transformations rather than on issues pertaining to the texts’ formal experimentation.
- 5.
This book club was a segment in the Richard & Judy chat show (Channel 4, November 2001–August 2008; Watch, October 2008–July 2009).
- 6.
For example, Fryer (1984) and Olusoga (2016). Bernardine Evaristo’s Soul Tourist (2009), a novel with verse features and images of traffic signs evoking the road trip that drives its plot, repurposes the conventional travel narrative genre to confront both her travelling protagonists and her readers, with their amnesia regarding the historical black presence in Europe (Evaristo 2008, 3).
- 7.
Friedman (2012, 163) suggests that ‘contemporary feminist experimentalists find new forms of subversion, adapting, for instance, the trickster figure […]. As the western male trickster helps society to stay in balance, the trickster in feminist avant-garde impedes or throws off-balance normative social narratives’.
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Bekers, E., Cousins, H. (2021). Helen Oyeyemi at the Vanguard of Innovation in Contemporary Black British Women’s Literature. In: Aughterson, K., Philips, D. (eds) Women Writers and Experimental Narratives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49651-7_12
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