The article explores the avant-garde literary production of contemporary British writer Bernardine Evaristo, ‘disobedient’ novels characterized by cross-fertilizations of literary genres, languages and artistic practices and by a constant dialogic afflatus which interweaves past and present breaking temporal, spatial and ideological boundaries, in order to assert and foster the freedom of fluid and multifaceted identities. The committed writing is aimed at ‘giving back voice’ to the black British community, and in particular to its women, challenging the racist and patriarchal regimes of representations which ‘normalize’ difference and subalternity through prejudiced discursive practices. Evaristo’s challenging and thought-provoking fusion fiction, which finds its most mature and accomplished expression in her latest novel, Girl, Woman, Other (2019), disrupts all canonical conventions, both in terms of forms and contents, creating a dense and complex network of intersecting lives, experiences, feelings and stories which encourages an ‘empathic’ form of knowledge, understanding and solidarity, an essential precondition for the creation of a democratic and free society based on mutual respect and full recognition and appreciation of all forms of alterity.
La parola creativa della disobbedienza: ribellione e impegno nella fusion fiction di Bernardine Evaristo
Maria Renata Dolce
2024-01-01
Abstract
The article explores the avant-garde literary production of contemporary British writer Bernardine Evaristo, ‘disobedient’ novels characterized by cross-fertilizations of literary genres, languages and artistic practices and by a constant dialogic afflatus which interweaves past and present breaking temporal, spatial and ideological boundaries, in order to assert and foster the freedom of fluid and multifaceted identities. The committed writing is aimed at ‘giving back voice’ to the black British community, and in particular to its women, challenging the racist and patriarchal regimes of representations which ‘normalize’ difference and subalternity through prejudiced discursive practices. Evaristo’s challenging and thought-provoking fusion fiction, which finds its most mature and accomplished expression in her latest novel, Girl, Woman, Other (2019), disrupts all canonical conventions, both in terms of forms and contents, creating a dense and complex network of intersecting lives, experiences, feelings and stories which encourages an ‘empathic’ form of knowledge, understanding and solidarity, an essential precondition for the creation of a democratic and free society based on mutual respect and full recognition and appreciation of all forms of alterity.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
