Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe: Re-Narrating Roman Britannia; De-Essentializing British National Identity

Abstract

The essay aims to demonstrate that, by representing the Black group as integral to British history, Bernardine Evaristo's The Emperor’s Babe imaginatively intervenes into the contemporary transmission of European history by unseating the conventional notion of racial purity on which the Western historical archive has been built. The novel thus questions hegemonic notions of Britishness and simultaneously re-inscribes them by offering new inclusive configurations of the British identity. Evaristo’s complex articulation of inter- and intra-gender power relations prevents the novel from developing the ethnic motif in simplistic celebratory terms and simultaneously enables the narrative to introduce topics relevant to the contemporary debate on Black women’s socio-political positioning in Britain. In so doing, The Emperor’s Babe, with its gender-sensitive representational strategies, posits itself as a resistant as well as denunciatory narrative space.