Helen Oyeyemi at the Vanguard of Innovation in Contemporary Black British Women’s Literature

This chapter addresses the underappreciated literary innovation of contemporary Britain’s black women writers, who, like women experimentalists in the twentieth century, have been underrepresented in both studies focused on innovative writing and women’s literature, despite their rising profiles, both nationally and internationally. With its emphasis on aesthetics, it refocuses the more common critical assessments of lack British women’s literature, which are concerned predominantly with the authors’ thematic commitment to issues of gender, ethnicity and race. Rather than simply read the texts as ‘ethnographical’ or sociopolitical, this chapter pays tribute to the willingness to innovate that permeates much writing by black British women in the twenty-first century, as is illustrated by their penchant for such strategies as linguistic experimentation, hybrid cross-genre writing, intertextuality and metafiction, for which they draw on diverse heritages, including myth, literature and history from Africa, the Caribbean and Europe. Through a preamble overview of these and other innovative strategies across a range of authors and a more extensive case study of Helen Oyeyemi, whose work is clearly situated at the vanguard of innovation in black British women’s writing, this chapter argues that acknowledging the breadth and depth of black British women writers’ formal and generic experimentations is a crucial act of reclamation and political activism.

ISBN:978-3-030-49650-0

Keywords:Black British Literature, Helen Oyeyemi, experimental literature

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