1981 From Lara

I began to dip into my skin like a wet suit, toes first, warily, wriggled about, then legs all in, by summer 81 I\u27d zipped up and dived head first, that year I started art school, Landscape of the Souls I called my anarchic blood and black vortexes, I loved exploding the energy of colours, being bold. Summer heat choked my city\u27s horizon, sluggish clouds of fumes were mountains of dirt way up in the ether. Tourists homed in on Piccadilly like brain damaged fish, I barged, my large portfolio an aggressive advance guard, boarded the bus to Camden Town, my squat room, all purple walls, pampas-grass and Mexican mats. Nights steamed my pores in the 100 Club where pupil-swimming arousal came in the countenance of Josh. Under his pillar-propping gaze, I tried to dance cool, slyly studied the Dreads in corners with towels round necks, trainers, shiny track-suits- red, gold and green striped, confidently shuffling, moving just off the beat. \u27Go slower, syncopate, less movement, more weight,\u27 we exchanged numbers like French kisses, at 2am my creamed knickers rode the night bus home

Mr Loverman and the Men in Black British Fiction : The Representation of Black Men in Black British Fiction

This thesis consists of two parts. The first part, the creative writing component, is an 82,000 word novel called Mr Loverman, about a seventy-four year old closet homosexual Antiguan man who has lived in London for fifty years and is making the decision to leave his wife of fifty years and move in with his long term male lover. The second part of this thesis is a 30,000 word critical commentary entitled The Representation of Black Men in Black British Fiction. This is an investigation into how black men have been portrayed by black novelists in novels from the 1950s onwards. It examines the field’s interests and critical perspectives, gender balances and generational trends. The commentary also examines the decision-making creative process of writing Mr Loverman and looks at how it disrupts expectations of heterosexuality and reconfigures postcolonial experience by prioritizing sexuality over race

Dove finisce il mondo

Dove finisce il mondo offers the first Italian translation of two cpmparatively recent stories by Bernardine Evaristo, the unpublished On Top of the World (2006) and I'm Think I'm Going Slightly Mad (I think I'm slightly crazy, 2011) and, in the appendix, the translation of her theoretical essay CSI Europe (2008), which refers to the thematic issues that affect the writer's stories and pervade her entire narrative production. The stories, in investigating contemporary forms of female distress, outline the extreme journeys of the protagonists in search of an identity free from gender and ethnic-racial conditioning: one in the Arctic lands whose whiteness becomes the scene of a potential suicide; the other in the virtual reality of the Internet in which the Ego multiplies in a vortex at the limits of alienation. The essay CSI Europe analyzes the contribution, often hidden, of figures of color and mixed ethnicity to the cultural history of Europe

Blonde Roots

peer reviewedThis article explores the relationship between literary form and the representation of history in Bernardine Evaristo’s Blonde Roots (2008). The text is premised on an ironic racial reversal of the Atlantic slave trade. As such, this single moment in international history is mobilised, brought into different contexts and demonstrated to be inherently malleable. In addition, Evaristo makes a critical engagement with the slave narrative form and highlights its limited and limiting nature. Blonde Roots is self-consciously full of narrators and narratives and contradicts any sense of a fixed historical vision of Atlantic slavery. Evaristo’s novel mindfully disrupts this history in order to demonstrate the myriad ways in which the Atlantic slave trade is relevant to a contemporary context. Although Blonde Roots retains Atlantic slavery as its central moment, it is a radical re-vision of its familiar history, and the texts which narrate it. Through these distortions Evaristo’s novel paradoxically demonstrates both the unreliability of the historical event and the shockwaves that still resound from it, and calls into question easy constructions of black British identities that are based upon the history of Atlantic slavery