1st Edition

Reading to Resist Contemporary Black British Women’s Writing

By Suzanne Scafe Copyright 2026
174 Pages
by Routledge

174 Pages
by Routledge

This is the first book to focus on writing by black British women writers, using an approach that highlights the potential of this fiction to intervene into discourses that shape the worlds in which it is situated. Reading to Resist: Contemporary Black British Women's Writing undertakes a close, innovative reading of the novels selected, one that focuses on the texts’ aesthetics as well as... Read more

Introduction  1. Resisting Voicelessness: Contemporary Black British Women’s Autobiography  2. Wrongdoing and Repair in the Work of Yvvette Edwards, Zadie Smith and Nadifa Mohamed  3. “Saying Madness”: Jacqueline Roy’s The Fat Lady Sings and the Fiction of Diana Evans  4. Parting the Veil, Re-writing and Re-purposing the Past: Laura Fish’s Strange Music and Sara Collins’s The Confession of Frannie Langton  5. Mobility, Achievement, and Failure: Buchi Emecheta’s Head above Water, Zadie Smith’s NW, Swing Time, and Natasha Brown’s Assembly

Biography

Suzanne Scafe is Visiting Professor at Vrije University, Brussels. She has taught at several Universities in Europe and in London, UK and written several journal articles and book chapters on the work of a wide range of African-diasporic writers. She is the author of Teaching Black Literature and co-author of The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain.