Writing Back: Intertextuality in Black British Women’s Writing

Black British Women's Writing, like other categories of diasporic African writing, makes ample use of intertextuality as a means to write back to the literary canons of Europe and their patriarchal and monochrome biases. In this paper I will take a closer look at the contemporary genre of the fictional slave narrative or "neo-slave narrative" (B.W. Bell 1987) that first emerged in the United States in the 1960s but has since flourished on both sides of the Atlantic. Published two centuries after the first African-British slave narrative (Equiano's Interesting Narrative (1789)) and three centuries after the first novelistic exploration of a slave's tragic life story (Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688)) - both of which only entered the English literary canon in the 1990s - the neo-slave narratives do not just highlight the horrors of the slave trade and slavery; they also seek to creatively recover voices that have been marginalized, both in and outside literature. With their intertextual references to older fictional texts and historical records, including actual slave narratives, they are addressing past and contemporary forms of "historical amnesia" (B. Evaristo 2011) and racism.
In my paper I will focus on some of the neo-slave narratives that have been published by Black British Women Writers in the last decade. True to the genre to which they belong, these narratives "approach the institution of slavery from a myriad perspectives and embrace a variety of styles of writing (V. Smith 2007) - whether this be Jackie Kay's radio and stage play, Laura Fish's bio-fiction, Joan Anim-Addo's libretto, Bernardine Evaristo's dystopian tale or Andrea Levy's historical novel. I will also show how Black British Women Writers are further developing the American-born genre by drawing increasingly explicit attention to the fictionality of History and the bias of the Western canon, not only through their creative use of intertextuality but also by means of other postmodernist literary strategies such as multiple narrative perspective, role reversal, irony, humour, metafiction.