Bernardine Evaristo’s ‘Black’ British Amazons: Aesthetics and Politics in Girl, Woman, Other (2019)

"Anyone can be a Relative:" Creating Communities Beyond Work Society in Novels From the 2010s

“…First, much of the novel is centred around a theatre performance on the opening night of an ageing but still rebellious director's new play. The theatre's appearance in the novel has been read as pointing towards Evaristo's own background in theatre (Courtois 2021), but at the same time it also provides a space in which a variety of characters can come together both as creators and as audience, and to which they bring their different backgrounds. However, the novel also makes a point of not confining the possibility of a transformative utopian community to the creative scene in London: its second central setting turns out to be a Northumbrian farm that belongs to a woman in her 90s, Hattie, who plans to leave the farm to her non-binary greatgrandchild, Morgan.…”

“Their Spidery Self”: On Webs of Subject-Object Empathy in Bernardine Evaristo’s Fiction

“…13 From her debut text Lara, a versified autobiografiction (1997), to her latest oeuvre Girl, Woman, Other (2019), the works of Bernardine Evaristo have been seen to stage a feminist politics of "dissensus" against the burden of dis-and re-location, of identity fracture and recomposition experienced by women in the Black diaspora. 14 Within the hermeneutic framework set by Arana and Ramey in their post-millennial survey of Black British writing, Evaristo's fiction -including, for instance, The Emperor's Babe, a "verse novel" about a Nubian poetess building her selfhood in ancient Roman London 15 -appears to convey a "sense of abiding alienness" 16 that has led different generations of Black British women to contest, in distinct ways and to differing degrees, their cultural exclusion and misrepresentation. 17 Evaristo's creative interests revolve, like those of other Black British writers like Jackie Kay, Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy and Helen Oyeyemi, around the diasporic fate of individuals exposed to nostalgic impossibilities of return to homelands that are still devastated by the after-effects of colonialism or of different generations of migrants coping with varying forms of vulnerability in Britain.…”