Moving Bodies and Identities Across the Atlantic: The Subversive Narrative of the Slave Trade in Bernardine Evaristo’s Blonde Roots

Abstract

The subversive quality of Bernardine Evaristo’s creative writing finds a most challenging expression in her fourth novel, Blonde Roots, published in 2008 after the celebrations which took place in Britain for the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade. The disrupting narrative, in which she operates a risky inversion of the history of the Black Atlantic in a race-reversal novel where “Aphrikans” enslave “Europanes”, is meant to shed new light on a notorious chapter of the ‘glorious’ history of the British Empire in order to provoke an awareness and knowledge not only of the horrors of the past, but also of their traumatic consequences and legacy in the present, revealing the centrality of that page both for Black and British history at large as well as for the shaping of contemporary identities.

DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE-239

Keywords: Evaristo, Blonde Roots, slave trade, neo-slave narratives, herstory.

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