Contemporary Black British feminist writing (2011-2017)challenging the praxis of interculturality

Abstract

This thesis explores the literary representation of the Black British community in selected fiction by Olumide Popoola, Natasha Marshall, Charlene James, and Mahsuda Snaith. The accounts produced by an emergent generation of Black British female authors map a literary tradition that locates the hybrid subject through terms that reflect a history of dispossession and institutional racism. The insertion of their work into the paradigms of multiculturality and interculturality comes with an investigation of ethnic, spatial, patriarchal, and heterosexist discrimination in urban and rural scenarios within the United Kingdom. When We Speak of Nothing (2017), Half Breed (2017), Cuttin’ It (2016), and The Things We Thought We Knew (2017) add to a literary trend that illustrates, answers, and contributes to current debates of a political and social significance. I explore literary representations of discriminatory acts through the lenses of intercultural praxis. This critical approach complicates neoliberal and hegemonic discourses that impose the subjugation of Britain’s racialised communities. In their attempt to relocate the modern hybrid subject, Popoola, Marshall, James, and Snaith examine individuals’ alienation from Britain’s narrative of belonging. I show how this displacement is ethnically motivated and it originates in the dualistic construction of the West as a racially superior entity. The discussion of the Black British texts which I analyse in my dissertation proves how Britain’s emphasis on identity politics and assimilationist policies has given room for unjustified patriotism and discriminatory procedures. The authors add to the debate of oppression by exploring spatial confinement. The marginalisation of Britain’s underprivileged communities reflects that the State’s policies on spatial management have two aims. First, to reinforce the marginalised status of these agents and, secondly, to restrict their potential by labelling them as second-class citizens. Through literary representations of spatial mismanagement, the selected female authors condemn the country’s inability to transform urban locations into intercultural spaces. In doing so, the hegemonic sectors of British society neglect that one of the goals of the intercultural paradigm is to avoid social ghettoisation. Popoola, Marshall, James, and Snaith investigate, too, the discriminatory potential of the patriarchal doctrine. Representations of how men and women navigate their identities in societies that punish non-heterosexual behaviours and praise old-fashioned gender norms enable the authors to explore the restrictive nature of rural and urban areas within Britain’s geography. This research not only focuses on the adverse effects that racial, religious, class, sexual, and gender prejudice have on underprivileged communities. My investigation also centres on an examination of racialised subjects’ potential to put an end to their marginalisation by adopting self-authoritative strategies. The characters’ stand against the British governments’ mismanagement of diversity serves the authors to expose the potential for accommodating minorities under the paradigm of interculturality. For this transformation to happen effectively, Popoola, Marshall, James, and Snaith suggest in their texts that the principles of equality, difference and respect must be safeguarded. Putting forward an interpretation of the Black British subject as an individual who has stood on the margins of society and who has been deprived of political participation, this thesis investigates to what extent the UK can become a post-racial society by implementing the intercultural doctrine. The selected fiction reflects that if the UK aspires to reach a stage when bigotry no longer exists, dominant stakeholders must engage into a political and social practice underpinned by two conditions. These prerequisites are, first, a commitment to abandoning individualism and boosting communitarian bonds and, secondly, the promotion of learning about othered minorities. Peaceful and harmonious coexistence among Britain’s heterogeneous groups would reduce the risks deriving from essentialism. In line with these ideas, I contend in this thesis that the emergent female voices of the Black British literary canon provide the grounds for cultural and historical resignification, as well as for the individual and collective emancipation of the Black British subject.