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Abstract
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Engagement with intersecting dimensions of Black British identity in these two novels is crucial for contemporary literary and cultural studies, for various interconnected and mutually reinforcing reasons.
First, intersectionality as articulated by Kimberlé Crenshaw and now extended through Black feminist scholarship beginning with the Combahee River Collective and extending to present-day scholars such as Patricia Hill Collins and Audre Lorde provides key analytical tools for understanding how race, gender, and class do not operate in isolation from one another or as separate oppressive mechanisms but rather as mutually reinforcing systems that produce complex forms of varying intensity of marginalization, oppression, and vulnerability. In order to understand the experiences of Black British women, we must insist upon analytical frameworks that resist being put in boxes.
Second, Assembly (2021) arrives at a historical juncture where public discussions of race and colonial legacies in modern Britain are several degrees hotter than when the novel was first published as the result of debates on racial justice, activism around Black Lives Matter; and ever more existential and mentally sapping professional experiences faced by Black women in elite institutions. And yet, for this contemporary context, one must analyze closely how Brown’s text challenges discourses on inclusion, institutional in/exclusion, meritocracy and the psychological price paid by those professionals who make it into the profession while never being institutionally emotionally at home or change its culture.
In third place, by comparing Smith with Brown, such an examination discerns key movements marking the development of twenty-first century Black British literary representation from a burgeoning focus on hybridity, multicultural negotiation and jubilant embrace of cultural mixture to a more scathing and unrelenting critical focus on the structural racism and classism that have been woven into Brit
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