“Presence into absence”: the production of national identity in The Emperor’s Babe and Girl, Woman, Other

Abstract

Bernardine Evaristo's artistic project includes establishing, uncovering, inventing, and expanding a Black British literary canon. While growing up, Evaristo did not encounter any Black British women "who were born or raised here and writing our stories from this perspective" (72). Instead, Evaristo's literary inspirations "came from African Americans: Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and Alice Walker were foremost among them, and of course Ntozake Shange…These were the writers who foregrounded black women's lives and in so doing gave me permission to write" (72). This canon of African American feminist and womanist writers informs the purposeful tensions in Evaristo's novel, such as the struggle between collective power and individual subjectivity, and universality and particularity. Although these authors provide that foundation for Evaristo, their presence also denotes a significant absence of representations of Black British women in novels…Faced with the dismissal of her own experience, Evaristo is conscious that her writing must unsettle the difference between how the literary market conceives of Black British readers and how Black British readers interact with fiction. To address the precarious presence of Black British writers in the British literary market, Evaristo foregrounds activism in her writing career.