"Being / together": Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other and the Black British women’s movement

Abram, N. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9695-0494 (2024) "Being / together": Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other and the Black British women’s movement. Contemporary Women's Writing, 18. vpae018. ISSN 1754-1484 doi: 10.1093/cww/vpae018

Abstract/Summary

This article locates Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker Prize-winning novel Girl, Woman, Other (2019) within the socio-political history and written lineage of the Black women’s movement in Britain. It identifies contextual resonances with the 1970s and 1980s praxis of collaboration and collectivity, and traces intertextual connections with Evaristo’s own early writing (including theatre, verse fiction, and the radio story from which the novel evolved) and the periodicals, anthologies and organization newsletters of the time. These references illuminate the novel’s structure, lineation, and narrative mode. I argue that Girl, Woman, Other reanimates the rallying call ‘we are here', affirming the presence and diversity of Black lives in Britain, while its distinctive ‘fusion fiction’ form actively engages readers, realising the Black feminist political principle of ‘speaking out’.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/116437
Identification Number/DOI	10.1093/cww/vpae018
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Literature and Languages > English Literature
Publisher	Oxford University Press
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