Abstract
Nancy Caronia explores The Emperor’s Babe (2001), a work set in AD 201 that calls into question the purity and privilege of contemporary Britain’s whiteness by confronting notions of racial and gender tensions in London, aka Londinium, Britannia, a heterogeneous outpost of the Roman Empire. Purposefully anachronistic, Evaristo’s poem as novel emulates Ovidian epic form in order to examine violence as both the means and the refusal of individual and collective madness. Madness is represented through the spectacle of the arena as well as through the narrative’s refusal to maintain linguistic accuracy. The narrator, Zuleika, the daughter of Sudanese merchant immigrants, switches between Latin and contemporary slang to reveal the ways in which she cannot occupy more than a tentative space in Londinium or in any of her relationships. In this configuration, violence is both sacrifice and self-gratification. Linguistic, cultural, and personal violence becomes the means through which to express or deny the madness of an oppressive and constraining social system.
ain’t no one never gonna write
about your life but you. Once you’re dead,
you never existed, baby, so get to it.
Venus to Zuleika in The Emperor’s Babe 1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Bibliography
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. 1813. Reprinted, with an introduction by William Dean Howells. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1918.
Baldwin, James. The Devil Finds Work. New York: Random House, 2000. First published in 1976 by Bantem Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968.
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. First published in 1994 by Routledge.
Brody, Jennifer DeVere. Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998.
Bronté, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Illustrated by F. H. Townsend. Reprint of the 1897 London edition, The Project Gutenberg, 2013. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1260/1260-h/1260-h.htm.
Carlson, Kathie. Life’s Daughter/Death’s Bride: Inner Transformation through the Goddess Demeter/Persphone. Boston: Shambala, 1997.
Cosgrove, Denis and Luciana L. Martins. “Millennial Geographics.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90, no. 1 (2000): 97–113.
Cuder-Domínguez, Pilar. “Ethnic Cartographies of London in Bernardine Evaristo and Zadie Smith.” European Journal of English Studies 8, no. 2 (2004): 173–188.
Dalby, Andrew. Food in the Ancient World from A to Z. London: Routledge, 2003.
Draper, N. “The City of London and Slavery: Evidence from the First Dock Companies, 1795–1800. Economic History Review 61, no. 2 (2008): 432–466.
Deevoy, Adrian. “Morrissey: Taking Up Your Arsenal/Ooh I say!,” The Q Interview. Q: The Modern Guide to Music and More. September 1992. 60–66. http://motorcycleaupairboy.com/interviews/1992/isay.htm.
Duff, Oliver. “Morrissey Blames Immigration for ‘Disappearance’ of British Identity.” The Independent, November 29, 2007. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/morrissey-blames-immigration-for-disappearance-of-british-identity-760825.html.
Dupont, Florence. Daily Life in Ancient Rome. Translated by Christopher Woodall. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. First published as La vie quotidienne du citoyen romain sous la République in 1989 by Hachette, France.
Evaristo, Bernardine. “Alastair Niven in Conversation with Bernardine Evaristo.” Wasafiri 16, no. 34 (2001): 15–20.
———. “On the Road: Bernardine Evaristo Interviewed by Karen Hooper.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 41, no. 3 (2006): 3–16.
———. The Emperor’s Babe. New York: Viking Penguin, 2002. First published in 2001 by Penguin Books Ltd.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967.
Fast, Howard. Spartacus. Armonk, NY: North Castle Books, 1996. First published in 1951 by M. E. Sharpe.
Fryer, Peter. Black People in the British Empire: An Introduction. London: Pluto Press, 1988.
Gladiator. Film. Directed by Ridley Scott. California: DreamWorks Pictures, 2000.
Gantz, Timothy. Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources, Vol. 1. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins Press, 1993.
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. First published in 1979 by Yale University.
Gilroy, Paul. ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991. First published in 1987 by The University of Chicago.
Goddard, Lynette. “Middle-Class Aspirations and Black Women’s Mental (Ill) Health in Zindika’s Leonora’s Dance, and Bonnie Greer’s Munda Negra and Dancing on Blackwater.” In Cool Britannia? British Political Drama in the 1990s. Edited by Rebecca D’Monté and Graham Saunders. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 96–113.
Gordon-Chipembere, Natasha. “Introduction: Claiming Sarah Baartman, a Legacy to Grasp.” In Representation and Black Womanhood: The Legacy of Sarah Baartman. Edited by Natasha Gordon-Chipembere. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Gray, Clive. “The Millennium Dome: ‘Falling From Grace.’” Parlimentary Affairs 56 (2003): 441–455.
Griffin, Gabrielle. Contemporary Black and Asian Women Playwrights in Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Gubar, Susan. “‘The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity.” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 2 (1981): 243–263.
Hobson, Janell. Body as Evidence: Mediating Race, Globalizing Gender. Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 2012.
Leonard, Mark. British TM : Renewing Our Identity. London: Demos, 1997.
McClintock, Anne. Double Crossings: Madness, Sexuality, and Imperialism. Vancouver, Canada: Ronsdale, 2001.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Penguin Putnam-Plume Book, 1998. First printed in 1987 by Alfred Knopf.
Morrissey, Steven Patrick. “The National Front Disco.” Your Arsenal. ℗ 1992 by Warner Off Roster. CD ASIN B000002LUL.
Paul, Kathleen. Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.
Powell, Enoch. “‘Rivers of Blood’ Birmingham speech.” Midland Hotel. April 20, 1968. The Telegraph. November 6, 2007. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643823/Enoch-Powells-Rivers-of-Blood-speech.html.
———. “Speech to London Rotary Club, Eastbourne.” Enoch Powell: Life and Views. November 16, 1968. http://www.enochpowell.net/fr-83.html.
Rawley, James A. London: Metropolis of Slave Trade. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2003.
Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. Edited by Judith L. Raskin. New York: Norton Critical Editions, 1998. First published in 1966 by André Deutsch.
Rogers, J.A. Sex and Race. Vols. 1–3. New York: Helga Rogers, 1968–1972.
Rome. Television. Directed by Michael Apted, et al. London: BBC, UK and HBO, USA, 2005–2007.
Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. New York: Random, 2008. First printed in 1989 by Viking.
Sharpe, Christina. Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010.
Spartacus. Television. Created by Steven S. DeKnight. USA: Starz Entertainment and 20th Century Fox Entertainment, 2010–2013.
Thatcher, Margaret. “Interview by Gordon Burns.” World in Action. Granada TV, January 27, 1968.
The Economist. “All Mod Cons.” September 27, 1997, 59–61.
Urban, Ken. “Cruel Britannia.” In Cool Britannia? British Political Drama in the 1990s. Edited by Rebecca D’Monté and Graham Saunders. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 38–55.
Ussher, Jane. Women’s Madness: Misogyny or Mental Illness. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.
Van Sertima, Ivan. African Presence in Early Europe. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1985.
Young, Hershini Bhana. Haunting Capital: Memory, Text, and the Black Diasporic Body. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Caronia, N. (2017). Resisting Displacement in Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe . In: Brown, C., Garvey, J. (eds) Madness in Black Women’s Diasporic Fictions. Gender and Cultural Studies in Africa and the Diaspora. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58127-9_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58127-9_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-58126-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-58127-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)