A major figure in the landscape of contemporary British writing, Bernardine Evari5to has published eight books focused on the untold stories of African diasporic lives. She is well known for her ...experiments in literary form and her talents writing across genres, including novels poetry, verse fiction, short fiction. essays, radio and theatre drama. Her works have attracted many prizes and accolades. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2004. she became Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2006 and has been Vice Chair of the Royal Society of Literature since 2017. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Bruner' University. London. Her latest book is a fusion fiction entitled Girl, Woman, Other (2019), that she calls •an anti- Brexit, anti•parochial, anti•patriarchal novel'. It has been shortlisted for the Booker prize.
Decolonization is presented in dominant accounts as an orderly transition and not the culmination of anticolonial resistance movements. This in turn contributes to what Paul Gilroy terms an endemic ...“post-imperial melancholia” across contemporary European nations and the removal of empire and its demise from understandings of European history. Drawing on Bill Schwarz’s reconceptualization of a Fanonian commitment to disorder, this article focuses on Britain’s history of colonialism and post-imperial immigration and argues for the mapping of a disorderly aesthetics in works by V. S. Naipaul, Bernardine Evaristo, and Eavan Boland. The three formal features of non-linearity, polyvocality, and environmental imagery enable these writers to bear witness to the complex histories of empire, transatlantic slavery, decolonization, and immigration from the colonial “margins”. These “aesthetics of disorder” counter a dominant narrative of decolonial order and challenge conceptions of British exceptionalism that were reinforced at the moment of imperial decline.
Presuming that both travel and crime fiction can be described as traditionally 'white' genres, this article investigates how contemporary Black British authors appropriate these genres. Focusing on ...Mike Phillips's A Shadow of Myself and Bernardine Evaristo's Soul Tourists, the article examines how the two novels redeem and suspend the traditional racial and national coding of travel writing and crime fiction by rehabilitating black mixed-race characters. In both novels, moreover, the rethinking of traditional popular genres coincides with, and is partly enabled by, a transnational shift in focus from Britain to Europe. A closer look at the novels' respective endings, finally, reveals how each conceptualises the relationship between Britain and Europe differently, and how this difference can be explained by the impact of genre.
This article analyses the construction and transmission of cultural memory through the use of music and lyrics in Bernardine Evaristo’s neo-slave narrative Blonde Roots. The first section introduces ...the term ‘cultural memory’ and the subsequent sections engage in close textual analysis of songs in their original version, the usage of spirituals, the creation of new songs through inspirations, and the creation of music lyrics through repetitions. My paper tries to increase the understanding of how music in Blonde Roots constructs and functions as cultural memory, and to contribute to future research on similar topics.
Verse novel genre is fast becoming a literary form through which writers express their ingenuities to produce texts having a tapestry of prosaic and poetic elements. Considering its unique structure ...and form, verse novel can be described as a paradigm of postmodernism that subverts or sacrifices normativity for esthetics and automaticity in narratology. The effect of this subversion is the creation of postmodern verse novels, and one area where the novels challenge conventional literature is in the use of paratactic narrative technique. The technique facilitates a juxtaposition of clausal or sentential elements with or without conjuncts, thereby enabling the production of spontaneous, conversational, rhythmic, and enjambed prose. Bernardine Evaristo, like many other postmodern writers, often employs this technique prominently. Her text, Lara, uses paratactic narrative mode in the narration of a chain of histories spanning three continents and many generations. This article, therefore, examines the signification of paratactic narrative technique and other postmodern models in Lara. The importance of the mode in textual exegesis is considered, while the article argues that parataxis yields plausible hermeneutics because of its reductionism. The approach offers a contrapuntal reading of phrasal, clausal, or sentential constituents which can begin a reductionist and textual interpretative process.
McConnell focuses on Bernardine Evaristo's novel The Emperor's Babe. Set in ancient Britain, this innovative and witty verse-novel explores the long and dignified history of black people in Britain, ...which extends far back in time, significantly beyond the period of skin-color racism that characterizes imperial and contemporary Britain. Exploring modern and ancient life in equal measure, and together, she argues that the transnational and transhistorical content of the text also challenges the likely categorization of the novel, or rather, adapting from Evaristo's own terms, its ghettoization as black British literature.
This book covers all Bernardine Evaristos major works: Lara (1997) and Lara (2009), The Emperors Babe, Soul Tourists, Blonde Roots and Hello Mum. Each chapter focuses on a particular novel, ...combining a close analysis of the authors technique with a penetrating understanding of Evaristos basic themes underlying all her work. This monograph exposes that Evaristo is not simply interested in multicultural issues; to label them as such is to overlook her achievement as a novelist. It shows i.
In her 2008 interview with Lane Ashfeldt discussing her neo-slave narrative Blonde Roots, author Bernardine Evaristo makes her intentions clear. Readers are situated in what she describes as a ..."parallel universe" in which Africans, as the slavers, perform the atrocities of transatlantic slavery—from the horrors of capture and bondage, to the racist ideological underpinnings. In order to circumvent the usual "strong responses including anger, defensiveness, resentment, self-righteousness, guilt, sadness," Evaristo humorously reverses and inverts the signs of transatlantic slavery (Newman 285). Her claim that utilizing a parallel universe gives readers a context for revisiting the atrocities of both the modern and historical is simple enough. At its base level, shifting from white slaver/black slave to black slaver/white slave forces readers to occupy different bodies. More than passive receivers of this history, we become active participants. Occupying new bodies and their inherent subject-positions allows readers to see the world anew and observe it with critical acuity. In my critical study of Blonde Roots, I (1) identify the signification process that undergirds racialist thinking; (2) explore the crucial role that humor plays as an interpolator in the signification process; and (3) demarcate the space Blonde Roots occupies within a racialized channel of the field of cultural production. In doing so, I propose that Evaristo's deconstruction of racialized bodies creates a "remainder" or a gap and that this space presents some fascinating questions about the malleability of language and how race functions as an exchangeable commodity in Paul Gilroy's "black Atlantic."
The kinaesthetic sensibility of recent discourses on cosmopolitanism has tended to universalise and abstract representations of global connectivity. The materiality of culture--understood here as an ...object-mediated form of cultural exchange--has been neglected in favour of a critical attention to hybrid and vernacular modes of being. Through Bernardine Evaristo's novel-with-verse Soul Tourists (2005), I rearticulate cosmopolitanism as a specific literary praxis that takes into account the significance of material life. By tracing the novel's fascination with cars and (auto) mobility, I interrogate how the text assembles cross-cultural and cross-material connections that complicate prevailing notions of cosmopolitanism as hybrid subjectivity. While praised for its progressive ability to reimagine black Britain through a distinctly black European context, Soul Tourists has yet to garner sustained debate concerning the commodified life of objects, like the car, which reconfigure such politicised tactics of belonging. I argue that a focus on the car enables a crucial phenomenological shift whereby the sights, smells and sounds of objects-in-motion reveal unexpected and unexplored outer-national relations between inanimate forms and animate bodies. The vehicular cosmopolitanism of Soul Tourists sets up the car as poesis in ways that unsettle the humanistic assumptions of vernacular cosmopolitanism./ La sensibilité cinesthésique des discours récents sur le cosmopolitisme a eu tendance a universaliser et a abstraire les rep résentations de l'interconnectivité globale. La materialité de Ia culture--entendue ici comme (orme d'échange culturel médiée par les objet--a été négligée, tandis que l'attention critique se portait vers des modes d'être hybrides et vernaculaires. Le roman Soul Tourists de Bernardine Evaristo (2005), mêlé de prose et de vers, permet d'esquisser une redefinition du cosmopolitisme en tant que praxis litteraire specifique, tenant corn pte de la portée significative de Ia vie matérielle. A travers Ia presence obsédante dans le roman des voitures et de la mobilité--de l'auto-mobilité--, on s'interroqera sur la façon dont le texte accumule des connexions transcultu relies et transmaterielles qui mettent en jeu la conception prédominante du cosmopolitisme comme sub jectivité hybride. Si l'on a Pu iozier, dans Soul Tourists, la capacité de i'auteur a réinventer dans un sens progressiste Ia Grande-Bretagne noire darts un contexte noir européen, le roman n'a pas encore suscité de veritable débat sur l'existence d'ob jets, devenzis produits de cons ommation, qui, teile la voiture, reconfigurent les tactiques politisées de l'appartenance. Il me semble qu'une telle reflexion autorise un déplacement phénomenologique crucial, en vertu duquel les images, les odeurs, les sons des objets en mouvement révèlent des relations extra-nationales inattendues entre in corps et les formes inanimées. Le cosmopolitisine vehiculaire de Soul Tourists fait de la voiture une poiesis, de manière a venir ébranler les postulats humanistes du cosmopolitisme vernaculaire.
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