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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
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’.
Works Cited
Primary Texts
Blackman, M. 2001–2008. Noughts and Crosses Series. London: Random House.
Burnett, E.-J. 2019. The Grassling. London: Allen Lane.
Emecheta, B. 1971. In the Ditch. London: Allison and Busby.
Emecheta, B. 1974. Second-Class Citizen. London: Allison and Busby.
Evaristo, B. 1997. Lara. Speldhurst, Kent: Angela Royal.
———. 2001. The Emperor’s Babe. London: Hamish Hamilton.
———. 2005. Soul Tourists. London: Hamish Hamilton.
———. 2008. Blonde Roots. London: Hamish Hamilton.
———. 2009. Lara (expanded edition). Hexham: Bloodaxe.
———. 2019. Woman, Girl, Other. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Kay, J. 2011. Why Don’t You Stop Talking. 2002. London: Picador.
———. 2008. The Lamplighter. London: Bloodaxe.
Koomson, D. 2006. My Best Friend’s Girl. London: Time Warner.
Mitchell, D.S. 2009. Geezer Girls. London: Hodder.
Okojie, I. 2015. Butterfly Fish. London: Jacaranda Books Art Music.
Oyeyemi, H. 2005a. The Icarus Girl. London: Bloomsbury.
———. 2005b. Juniper’s Whitening & Victimese. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
———. 2007. The Opposite House. London: Bloomsbury.
———. 2009. White Is for Witching. London: Picador.
———. 2011. Mr Fox. London: Picador.
———. 2014. Boy, Snow, Bird. London: Picador.
———. 2016a. What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours. London: Picador.
———. 2016b. What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours. New York: Riverhead.
———. 2019. Gingerbread. London: Picador.
Smith, Z. 2005. On Beauty. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Secondary Texts
Akumiah, H. 2016. Bookforum Talks with Helen Oyeyemi. Bookforum, June 20. https://www.bookforum.com/interviews/bookforum-talks-with-helen-oyeyemi-16190. Accessed 30 Jan 2020.
Arana, V.R. 2007a. Introduction: Aesthetics as Deliberate Design: Giving Form to Tigritude and Nommo. In ‘Black’ British Aesthetics Today, ed. V.R. Arana, 1–16. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
———., ed. 2007b. ‘Black’ British Aesthetics Today. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Arana, V.R., and L. Ramey. 2009. Introduction. In Black British Writing, ed. V.R. Arana and L. Ramey, Rev., 1–7. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Armstrong, J. 2014. Experimental Fiction: An Introduction for Readers and Writers. London: Bloomsbury.
Bäckström, P., and B. Hjartarson, eds. 2014. Decentring the Avant-Garde. Amsterdam: Brill.
Bekers, E. 2018. Creative Challenges to Captivity: Slave Authorship in Black British Neo-Slave Narratives. Arteel, I, Bekers, E, Schandevyl E (eds) Critical Interrogations of the Interrelation of Creativity and Captivity, Life Writing 15 (1): 23–42.
Berry, E.E. 2016. Women’s Experimental Writing: Negative Aesthetics and Feminist Critique. London: Bloomsbury.
Bluemel, K. 2010. Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Booth, F. 2012. Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940–1980. Milton Keynes: Marston Gate.
Brace, M. 2011. Mr Fox, by Helen Oyeyemi, The Independent, June 17. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/mr-fox-by-helen-oyeyemi-2298490.html. Accessed 30 Jan 2020.
Bray, J., A. Gibbons, and B. McHale, eds. 2012. The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. London: Routledge.
Brennan, T. 1990. Writing from Black Britain. Literary Review 34 (1): 1–11.
Clarke, C. 2015. Tracing the Ethical Dimension of Postwar British Experimental Fiction. University of Southampton, Faculty of Humanities, Doctoral thesis, 193 pp.
Cobham, R., and M. Collins, eds. 1987. Watchers and Seekers: Original Anthology of Creative Writing by Black Women Living in Britain. London: The Women’s Press.
Cousins, H. 2012. Helen Oyeyemi and the Yoruba Gothic: White Is for Witching. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 47 (1): 47–58.
Ellis, D. 2007. Writing Home: Black Writing in Britain Since the War. Stuttgart and Hannover: ibidem-Verlag.
Evaristo, B. 2008. CSI Europe. Wasafiri 23 (4): 2–7.
———. 2016. Speak Gigantular by Irenosen Okojie Review – Surreal Tales of Love and Loneliness. The Guardian, November 24. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/24/speak-gigantular-by-irenosen-okojie-review. Accessed 30 Jan 2020.
Freitag, K. 2006. Cultural Criticism in Women’s Experimental Writing: The poetry of Rosmarie Waldrop, Lyn Hejinian and Susan Howe. Heidelberg: Winter.
Friedman, E.G. 2012. Sexing the Text/Women’s Avant-Garde Writing in the Twentieth Century. In The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, ed. J. Bray, A. Gibbons, and B. McHale, 154–167. London: Routledge.
Friedman, E.G., and M. Fuchs, eds. 1989. Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Fryer, P. 1984. Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto.
Goddard, L. 2009. ‘Death Never Used to Be for the Young’: Grieving Teenage Murder in Debbie Tucker Green’s Random. In The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature (1945–2010), ed. D. Osborne, 299–309. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gunning, D. 2010. Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Kean, D. 2015. Black and Asian Writers and Publishers in the UK Market- place. London: Spread the Word.
Kennedy, D., and C. Kennedy. 2013. Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain 1970–2010: Body, Time and Locale. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
King, N. 2009. ‘Creolisation and On Beauty: Form, Character and the Goddess Erzulie’. Special Issue: Contemporary Black British Women’s Writing. Women: A Cultural Review 20 (3): 262–276.
Laursen, O.B. 2012. Black and Asian British Life Writing: Race, Gender and Representation in Selected Novels from the 1990s. PhD thesis, The Open University.
Lima, M.H. 2004. The Margin at the Centre: Teaching Black British Women Writers. Black British Writing, Special Issue of Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora 5 (2): 60–69.
Loeffelholz, M. 1992. Experimental Lives: Women and Literature, 1900–1945. New York: Twayne Publishers, Toronton: Maxwell Macmillan Canada, New York: Maxwell Macmillan International.
Marriott, D. 2017. Introduction: Black Experimental Poetics. Special Issue: Black Experimental Poetics. The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research 47 (1): 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2017.1264826.
McLeod, J. 2004. Postcolonial London. London: Routledge.
———. 2010. Extra Dimensions, New Routines: Contemporary Black Writing of Britain. Wasafiri 25 (4): 45–52.
Mitchell, K., ed. 2015. Experimental Writing. Special Issue of Contemporary Women’s Writing 9 (1).
Morrison, T. 1988. Beloved. London: Picador.
Nasta, S., ed. 2002. Writing in Britain: Shifting Geographies. Special Issue of Wasafiri 36.
Nielsen, A.L. 2012. Experiments in Black: African-American Avant-Garde Poetics. In The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, ed. J. Bray, A. Gibbons, and B. McHale, 168–181. London: Routledge.
Niesen de Abruña, L. 2000. Sea Changes: African-Caribbean and African Women Writers in England. In British Women Writing Fiction, ed. A. Werlock, 270–292. Tuscaloosa: Alabama University Press.
Noland, C., and B. Watten, eds. 2009. Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement, 189–206. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Olusoga, D. 2016. Black and British: A forgotten History. London: Macmillan.
Onega, S., and J.-M. Ganteau, eds. 2007. The Ethical Component in Experimental British Fiction since the 1960s. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Osborne, D., ed. 2009. Special Issue: Contemporary Black British Women’s Writing. Women: A Cultural Review 20 (3).
———. 2015. Resisting the Standard and Displaying Her Colours: Debbie Tucker Green at British Drama’s Vanguard. In Modern and Contemporary Black British Drama, ed. M.F. Brewer, L. Goddard, and D. Osborne, 161–177. London: Palgrave.
Parker, A., and S. Young. 2013. Transnationalism and Resistance: Experience and Experiment in Women’s Writing. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Pirker, E.U. 2011. Narrative Projections of a Black British History. London/New York: Routledge.
Ramey, L. 2007. Situating a ‘Black’ British Poetic Avant-Garde. In ‘Black’ British Aesthetics Today, ed. R.V. Arana, 79–100. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
———. 2009. Diaspora and the Avant-Garde in Contemporary Black British Poetry. In Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement, ed. C. Noland and B. Watten, 189–206. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Reed, A. 2014. Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Sandhu, Suzanne. 2003. London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City. London: Harper.
Scafe, Suzanne. 2015. Unsettling the Centre: Black British Fiction. In The History of British Women’s Writing, 1970-Present, ed. M. Eagleton and E. Parker, vol. 10, 214–228. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sell, J.P.A. 2007. Experimental Ethics: Autonomy and Contingency in the Novels of Zadie Smith. In The Ethical Component in Experimental British Fiction Since the 1960s, ed. S. Onega and J.-M. Ganteau, 149–169. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Smith, P.D. 2019. The Grassling by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett Review – A Geological Memoir. The Guardian, March 21. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/21/the-grassling-by-elizabeth-jane-burnett-review. Accessed 30 Jan 2020.
Sommer, R. 2001. Fictions of Migration. Ein Beitrag zu Theorie und Gattungstypologie des zeitgenössischen interkulturellen Romans in Großbritannien. Trier: Wissenschaftliger Verlag Trier.
———. 2007. The Aesthetic Turn in ‘Black’ Literary Studies: Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and the Case for an Intercultural Narratology. In ‘Black’ British Aesthetics Today, ed. R. Victoria Arana, 176–192. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Stein, M. 2004. Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Vincent, S. 2012. Experimental Writing Within the Postcolonial Framework: Counterrealistic Diasporic and Non-diasporic Indian Writing in English. Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing.
Warner, M. 2010. Signs &Wonders: Essays on Literature and Culture. London: Vintage.
Weedon, Chris. 2008. Migration, Identity, and Belonging in British Black and South Asian Women’s Writing. Contemporary Women’s Writing 2 (1): 17–35.
———. 2009. Identity and Belonging in Contemporary Black British Writing. In Black British Writing, ed. V.R. Arana and L. Ramey, 73–97. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Werlock, A., ed. 2000. British Women Writing Fiction. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Wisker, G. 2000. Black British Women’s Writing. In Post-colonial and African American Women Writers: a Critical Introduction, ed. G. Wisker, 273–300. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2004. Negotiating Passages: Asian and Black Women’s Writing in Britain. Hecate 30 (1): 10–29.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
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
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49651-7_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-49650-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-49651-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)