Re-collecting black British History in the fiction of Caryl Phillips and Bernardine Evaristo

• Autores: Sofía Muñoz Valdivieso
• Localización: Proceedings of the 30th International AEDEAN Conference: [electronic resource] / María Losada Friend (ed. lit.), Pilar Ron Vaz (ed. lit.), Sonia Hernández Santano (ed. lit.), Jorge Casanova García (ed. lit.), 2007, ISBN 978-84-96826-31-1
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • A number of fictions in recent years have produced visions of the past that explode a prevalent myth about the history of Britain, the belief that the first black settlers in the country were the post-war immigrants of the late 1940s. Two significant examples of fictions of the distant past that reclaim the inclusion of black people are "Cambridge" (1991) by Caryl Phillips and "The Emperor's Babe" (2001) by Bernardine Evaristo. They use two very different approaches to the re-inscription of black history, since Cambridge employs a pastiche of nineteenth-century language in a narrative inspired by Olaudah Equiano's 1789 autobiography, while Evaristo's novel-in-verse is a wild extravaganza full of blatant anachronisms that flout any illusion of historical verisimilitude. In their very different ways, however, both novels explore through their fictions of the past what it means to belong in Britain in the present: they complicate the vision of the country's past as homogeneous and make a contribution to the acceptance of plurality and hybridity in the present, so that the awareness that Britain has had a long history of immigration prior to the post-war period can serve to enrich contemporary conceptions of Britishness.