Rewriting ‘white’ genres in search of Afro-European identities: Travel and crime fiction by Bernardine Evaristo and Mike Phillips

Abstract

Presuming that both travel and crime fiction can be described as traditionally ‘white’ genres, this article investigates how contemporary Black British authors appropriate these genres. Focusing on Mike Phillips’s A Shadow of Myself and Bernardine Evaristo’s Soul Tourists, the article examines how the two novels redeem and suspend the traditional racial and national coding of travel writing and crime fiction by rehabilitating black mixed-race characters. In both novels, moreover, the rethinking of traditional popular genres coincides with, and is partly enabled by, a transnational shift in focus from Britain to Europe. A closer look at the novels’ respective endings, finally, reveals how each conceptualises the relationship between Britain and Europe differently, and how this difference can be explained by the impact of genre.