The Case for Narratology: Black British and African American Women’s Writing

The clarion call of political moments of reckoning, like the Black Power movement in the 1960s and 1970s and, at present, the Black Lives Matter movement, often startle readers, editors and publishers who are unfamiliar with black women’s writing or were previously unconvinced by its commercial and literary potential into different perspectives. Each generation, it would seem, must learn anew how this writing traverses a rich and varied terrain, and how its themes, styles and subgenres are unpredictably ‘relevant’. Eschewing this generational amnesia is Jean Wyatt and Sheldon George’s edited collection, Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form: it demonstrates a mature, nuanced understanding of black women’s writing on both sides of the Atlantic, and in doing so offers an elastic interpretation of ‘contemporary’. The editors’ concern with form and with ‘ethical dilemmas’ connected to race and gender presents an excellent lens through which to consider canonical and less well-known writers side by side. The collection offers readers—especially students and researchers—a needed set of case studies that engage black women’s literature in new ways, beyond the pursuit of an ‘ancestral line’ and ‘a maternal genealogy’ (7). With essays that foreground close readings and deploy critical frameworks ranging from affect theory to the aesthetics of difference, Wyatt and George build on the popularity of numerous monographs and courses that read black women’s writing cross-culturally and transnationally. They justify reading Black British and African American women writers together based on shared themes, similar influences and a common history of Jean Wyatt and Sheldon George, eds, Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form. Routledge, 2020, £96.00 hardback 9780367189280