We are honoured to welcome Professor Suzanne Scafe to give the keynote lecture.
KEYNOTE: Cartographies of Affect: Bernardine Evaristo’s London Fictions
Bernardine Evaristo has described London as one of her muses, a place with which she has a deep creative connection: it is the site around which many of her novels’ meanings are framed and given form, even when the narrative stretches across other spaces and places, both mythical and real. My talk focuses on her narratives’ construction of London as a space of affective belonging and on the use of space and place to reimagine the past and to reconfigure the materiality of a present that is also future facing. In order to trace the circulation of affect in the work I analyse, I draw on Foucault’s concept of space as heterogeneous, as a set of relations, networks and contradictions. He argues that ‘heterotopias’, places and spaces whose meaning and intention are subverted, are the most dramatic example of heterogeneity. Evaristo’s city spaces are rich with affect: hate, violence and disappointment as well as compassion, love and optimism. Through its representations of intimacy and of processes of social interaction and reproduction, the texts’ language, described by the author herself as ‘full of emotion’ (The Verb, BBC Radio 3, 12 November 2021), strengthens and deepens the feelings evinced by place and space. In her work, London, and by extension Britain, are not merely staging posts or dwelling places en route from or to somewhere else, but places and spaces in which African diasporic peoples have become rooted.
Suzanne Scafe is Visiting Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Brighton and Associated Senior Researcher at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She was a member of OWAAD and Brixton Black Women’s Group, and with Beverley Bryan and Stella Dadzie co-authored the landmark text The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (Virago 1985; Verso 2018). Suzanne has written extensively on Black British and Caribbean literature and culture. She is the author of Teaching Black Literature (Virago, 1989) and co-editor of several collections of essays, most recently the interdisciplinary anthology African-Caribbean Women Interrogating Diaspora/(Post) Diaspora (Routledge, 2022). Her latest book, Reading to Resist: Fiction by Contemporary Black British Women Writers, was published by Routledge in July 2025.