Speculative Reversals: Conflating (Parodied) Utopia and (Focalized) Dystopia in Bernardine Evaristo's Blonde Roots

This paper sets out to analyse Blonde Roots (2009) by Bernardine Evaristo focusing on its textuality and narrative strategies in order to investigate the ways in which the novel’s many inversions and subversions trigger a reflection on literary genre interlinked with political issues of gender, race and class. The novel retells an inverted version of the history of the transatlantic slave trade within a redesigned world geography which reflects human power distribution. It is both a “what if” and a “this is what was” story, a work of speculative fiction which problematizes clear-cut distinctions between utopia and dystopia showing that such a contrast depends on perspective and point of view. Blonde Roots’ provocative reversals blend generic features, problematise traditional labels and bend established narrative conventions to foreground the (constructive and deconstructive) power of storytelling, which emerges quite forcefully also thanks to an intertextual web of strategic references to the Western literary canon. Investigating these references leads one back to scrutinising generic categories, as intertextual allusions at once question (parodically) and reinforce (ideologically) the dystopian framework of the novel and the discursive articulation of gendered and racialised bodies and identities it substantiates.