Taking Black British Literature to the Deconstruction Table
Abstract
This paper interrogates what might be gained by exploring Black British Literature through Derridean lens as framed by Elisabeth Weber’s assertion that “Deconstruction is Justice” (2005). Concerns cluster around justice and injustice, how these relate to race, whose voices are heard on the subject and how these fold into philosophical thought’s functioning in the academy. The paper attempts to centralise women’s and UK voices including Beckles-Raymond’s “critical philosophy of race” while amplifying Monahan’s insistence that “the metaphor of racism as a kind of global political struggle for territory” is no “mere metaphor.”
Black British Literature—a diverse aesthetic born of Britain’s erstwhile empire and its interlinked diaspora—is contextualised here within coloniality and resistance as a literary product presenting an urgent complexity that remains little appreciated and largely disregarded in the UK university. At the same time, the field’s scholarly growth appears more evident abroad than within the UK. Notably, the corpus raises political, ethical, cultural and aesthetic questions crucial to an understanding of persistent exclusionary academic practice perceived by many as itself requiring urgent decolonial attention. Moreover, as Bhambra suggests, critical theory itself has “not been immune to calls to “decolonize,”’ particularly regarding its persistent refusal to acknowledge questions of coloniality’s continued impact in the present (2021).
Jacqueline Crooks’ Fire Rush (2023) and Sara Collins’s The Confessions of Frannie Langton (2019) contribute a literary focus to this paper. They are selected for their figuring of questions of memory and black confinement. How might justice be brought to the fore regarding such writing and to what effect? How Black British Literature might promote the textual real to foreground the many contradictions upon which it is founded while exposing injustice is examined through an example that is considered deconstruction praxis.
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