Memory, belonging and quest for the self in contemporary multi-ethnic black British women's autofiction

This thesis examines the development of autofiction along with the other directions it has led to such as autoethnography and autotheory, and explores their textual potentialities to reproduce the underrepresented realities of multi-ethnicity. In contradistinction to the white heterosexual male subject of traditional autobiography, the thesis is concerned with the ways in which these mixed literary novelties permit racialised and gendered individuals to resist the dominant systems of representation and to depict their multi-layered subjectivities and existence outside normative definitions. Although the thesis claims to focus specifically on works by the authors who are grouped under the label 'Black British women', it seeks to demonstrate ineffectiveness of homogenising categories of identification by offering a comparative analysis of Welsh-Guyanese Charlotte Williams's Sugar and Slate (2002), Scottish-Nigerian Jackie Kay's Red Dust Road (2010), and English-Nigerian Bernardine Evaristo's Lara (1997/2009). These mixed-descent authors' portrayals of the diversity of their ethnic backgrounds and uniqueness of their life journeys evidence that there is not a single way of being 'British', 'black' or 'woman'. The contention of the thesis is that hybridity and in-betweenness of autofiction mirror the multi-ethnic feeling of being caught between different cultural worlds, and its ambivalence within literary categorisation provides spaces of inclusion for individuals whose multiple ethnicities transcend the strict borders of pre-existing racial, national, ethnic and cultural classifications. It is further argued that autoethnography enables these authors to imagine their personal worlds as intricately connected to multiple collective worlds, and to assert interconnectivity of cultures and societies, which disrupts the hegemonic divisions between Europeanness and Africanness. The thesis is structured around the contemporary perspectives on the concepts of memory, belonging and subjectivity, which are argued to be relevant to the main assumptions of both autofiction and multiethnicity.