Between the black Atlantic and Europe: Emerging paradigms in contemporary black British writing Samantha Elizabeth Reive Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of English September 2015 - ii - The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his/her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. The right of Samantha Elizabeth Reive to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. © 2015 The University of Leeds and Samantha Elizabeth Reive. - iii - Acknowledgements My biggest intellectual debt is to my stalwart supervisor, Professor John McLeod. I could not have asked for a mentor who would guide my work with more enthusiasm, clarity, and intellectual rigour (even if I sometimes struggled to decipher your handwriting!) This thesis would not be what it is today without your ever-expanding range of metaphors, and I would not be the scholar I am today without your mentorship. Thank you for always encouraging me to think harder, and reminding me to push the boundaries. I would like to thank Professor Bénédicte Ledent for very generously sharing her time, expertise, and most of all a pre-publication copy of her most recent article on Caryl Phillips’s work. Her input has been invaluable to the progression of Chapter One of the thesis. Thanks also to my School of English colleagues Ragini Mohite, Dr Ed Powell, Christine Gilmore, and Dr Simone Lomartire for their willingness to listen to my many crises of confidence at various points in the construction of this work. Your support and advice was always gratefully received. Special thanks must go to my team of dedicated and (somewhat) willing proofreading volunteers – Sian Cummins, Martin Empson, Nic Holland, Dr Ed Powell and Christoffer Woodard. Any errors which have made it into this copy are fully my responsibility, and no reflection of their attention to detail. I have been extremely lucky to have been supported by a close circle of friends and family, who reminded me that there was life beyond the thesis. I owe particular debts of gratitude to Holly Cavenon (for always checking up on me, and for innumerable mental health conversations over cups of tea), Jessica Spencer, Imran Aslam, David and Brett Leadley-Kramer, Mariel Plummer, Patrick Reive, and Flis Holland. Thank you to Val and Dave Holland, for your quiet and persistent encouragement, and for providing a quiet space to work (and an endless supply of tea) at a critical juncture of my writing-up. I could not have embarked on this journey without the emotional and financial support of my parents, Andrew and Mari. You raised me to love words and to aim high, and your unfailing faith in me (even when I have no faith in myself) means the world to me. Finally, to my wonderful husband, Nic. What can I say? You married me while I was in the throes of writing-up, there’s no stronger proof of love than that! Words cannot adequately express how grateful I am for all the many sacrifices you have made for this thesis, and for your unwavering commitment to me, even when I drive you crazy. I couldn’t have done this without you. All my love, forever. This thesis is dedicated to the memory of Elizabeth (Betty) Setzer O’Neal, who was an outstanding woman of strength, purpose, and achievement. - iv - Abstract My thesis explores the emerging concerns of contemporary black British writing. I index the move towards a non-normative black British aesthetic through my reading of the twenty-first century novels of Diana Evans, Bernardine Evaristo, Caryl Phillips and Zadie Smith. I hypothesise that the works interrogated in the thesis offer a break from the generational model of black British writing, and in so doing shift the trajectories of black British writing away from the triangulated model of Paul Gilroy’s ‘black Atlantic’. I argue that the novels posit a non-normative black British aesthetic which draws upon multidirectional cultural trajectories. Locating this non-normative aesthetic in relation to iterations of Englishness allow my readings of the novels to uncover a newly emergent writing of black British selfhood which engages with transcultural and non-diasporic modes of cosmopolitan belonging. I identify a positioning of Europe as an alternative dwelling place which allows for new trajectories of travel for the black British subject. Subsequently, this thesis interrogates the implications for collective cultural histories, narrative and memory in which critical theories of cosmopolitanism and multidirectional memory intervene. I hypothesise a transformative energy within contemporary black British fiction as it moves on from the language of identity, crosses the boundaries of nationhood and memory, and offers a new vocabulary for the articulation of cultural belonging and ‘Englishness’. - v - Table of Contents Acknowledgements ................................................................................................... iii Abstract ..................................................................................................................... iv Table of Contents ...................................................................................................... v Introduction: Exploring the twenty-first century trajectories of black British writing .................................................................................................. 1 Chapter 1: Contemporary Englishness in the work of Caryl Phillips ............... 37 Chapter 2: Constrained Cosmopolitanisms in Zadie Smith's Willesden novels ............................................................................................................... 88 Chapter 3: Multi-locational Cosmopolitanism in the novels of Diana Evans ............................................................................................................. 138 Chapter 4: Trajectories of Multi-Axial Englishness in Bernardine Evaristo's Lara and Soul Tourists ............................................................... 189 Conclusion: Emerging paradigms in contemporary black British writing ..... 238 Works Cited ........................................................................................................... 245 Works Consulted ................................................................................................... 261 - 1 - Introduction Exploring the twenty-first century trajectories of black British writing ‘in the silence of the sky I longed for an image, a story, to speak to me, describe me, birth me whole. Living in my skin, I was, but which one?’ (Lara 1997 69) In 2009, black British poet and author Bernardine Evaristo published a revised and expanded second edition of her 1997 semi-autobiographical novel-in-verse, Lara. Lara tells the story of the eponymous protagonist’s childhood in London suburbia, and interweaves her experiences of growing up in 1970s London with the diasporic histories of her Anglo-Irish-Nigerian parents and ancestors. In the original 1997 edition, the novel-in-verse focuses heavily on Lara’s paternal ancestry, that of the black Atlantic diaspora. The narrative traces the history of the da Costa family, beginning with the death of Lara’s great-great grandmother Tolulope at the hands of a sexually sadistic slave master in Brazil, and ending with Lara and her parents visiting Nigeria, and later Brazil, together in her adulthood and returning to a Britain with ‘the “Great” Tippexed out of it’ (1997 140). Although a few brief lines in the first edition are devoted to the story of Lara’s maternal Irish heritage, the focus is on the journey of this mixed-race child to connect with her blackness, hunting for the stories that her father Taiwo deliberately withholds from his daughters. The first edition of the text has previously been read as exploring the cultural legacies of empire, in which ‘[i]nside the nation’s forgetfulness about empire, the memory-traces [of racial tension] remained’ (Schwarz 15). However, despite the ability to read the text as ‘exploring the global connections established during empire’ (Mycock 19), with the revised edition Evaristo’s narrative contributes to a new articulation of English writing which - 2 - grapples with the received characteristics of the post-empire English novel, and in doing so builds a new framework with which to interrogate contemporary articulations of Englishness. In contrast to the originally published text, the revised edition of Lara (2009) devoted a substantial portion of the narrative to tracing the protagonist’s Anglo-Irish- German ancestory back through the generations of her maternal line. In linking Lara’s genealogical search to all of the varied trajectories of her heritage, Evaristo repositions her as located at the centre of interweaving, polycultural migrant histories. The new focus of the text is signalled by the cover artwork, which no longer depicts an African tribal mask, but features instead the wedding photo of Evaristo’s own parents. This new image reinforces both the multiplicity of cultures to be unearthed, and also the personal nature of the events of the text. In addition to expanding the Irish strain of the narrative, with the new edition Evaristo details the previously glossed-over German heritage