Osabia, Rolake Whitney; (2024) Isolation and Kinship in Contemporary Black British Women’s Writing. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Text PhD Thesis - Rolake Osabia (Redacted Version).pdf - Accepted Version Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 1 April 2026. Download (9MB)

Abstract

Through a Black feminist lens, this thesis examines how Black British women writers Yrsa Daley-Ward, Zadie Smith, Winsome Pinnock and Bernardine Evaristo construct themes of isolation and kinship in their respective novels, plays and poems. Focusing on late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century texts (1987–2019) set primarily in Britain, I combine textual analysis and theories on loneliness and belonging to identify how the writers simultaneously explore isolation and kinship in literature. Through complementary art-as-praxis and archival research methodologies, I engage alternative ways of literary analysis and research. When theorising isolation and kinship in these works, I distinguish between character- and site-focused representations and assess how Daley-Ward, Smith, Pinnock and Evaristo engage with different literary and artistic traditions. I examine how the isolated character navigates elective and consanguineal kinships and the (dis)comfort of their loneliness when considering constructions of their Blackness, gender, sexuality and class. This thesis also analyses the spatial role of material sites; physical and digital points of encounter; and the significance of artefacts as tools which the characters use to negate isolation or seek kinship. I argue that portrayals of literary, artistic and societal kinships are enabled through the writers’ continuous engagement with past, present and future archives, as well as with Black diasporic literary and artistic traditions and histories. Furthermore, I highlight how Black British women writers have experimented with genre, style and narrative techniques to represent the themes of isolation and kinship in their writing through their interaction with cultural, collective and personal histories. This underscores the kinship between readers, characters, and writers, despite the solitary and isolated nature of acts of reading, narration and writing.

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