Social Justice and Activism in Contemporary Black British Literature: A Comparative Study of Girl, Woman, Other and The Fortune Men

Abstract

Social justice and activism are critically examined in the context of contemporary Black British literature, with a comparative analysis of Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (2019) and Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men (2021). The present study shows how Evaristo’s polyphonic narrative, spanning several generations of Black British women, foregrounds resilience and the intersectional struggles against systemic oppression. At the same time, Mohamed’s historical novel gives voice to the silenced Mahmood Mattan, a seaman from Somalia who was wrongfully sentenced in Cardiff and executed in the 1950s. Using frameworks such as postcolonial feminism, intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989), and the concept of narrative justice (Ricoeur, 2004), this study proposes that these novels engage in literary activism, in which the silenced voices of the marginalised persons become sites of resistance and remembrance. The analysis reveals how the two literary works converge in their activist stages, exposing racial inequalities and suggesting resilience, despite the different narrative strategies of polyphonic contemporaneity and historical reconstruction employed by Evaristo and Mohamed, respectively. So, the current study will make a significant contribution to Black British literature, for it underscores the activist form of storytelling and situates these novels as essential engagements in Britain’s political and cultural discourse on race, identity and about justice.