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.
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 Black Atlantic as Dystopia Newman, Judie
Comparative literature studies (Urbana),
06/2012, Letnik:
49, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Here, Newman analysis Afro-British author Bernadine Evaristo's Blonde Roots (2009). Evaristo's novel, through its inversion of race in the master-slave relationship, forces the reader to consider the ...ways global racial formations cross over colonial/postcolonial histories to redefine ideology and power. She explores the normalization of racial hierarchies while providing a glimpse of the ways globalization is defining a new politics of empire that frame the English as well as the Spanish, Portuguese and French black Atlantic. Evaristo's satirical spin on racial hierarchies reminds of Caribbean philosopher Sylvia Wynter's proposition that people must now replicate Columbus' creation of a "new image of the earth" by creating a "new image of the human," based on a trans-racial mode of inclusive altruism, beyond the limits of the national subject and the nation-state. Luso-African and Afro-Latin American populations in the Atlantic world have been historically and are today forging these transnational solidarities in their artistic, social, and political manifestations.
Collins interviews Bernardine Evaristo, an English and bi-racial writer, who talks about her books. Evaristo is deeply interested in the connection between Africa and Europe which is a dominant ...feature in her writings. Her new novel, written in prose entitled Blonde Roots, the history is inverted so that Europeans are considered savage and barbaric, and Africans are considered civilized and superior in every conceivable way.
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