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No More Playing in the Dark: Assembly by Natasha Brown
- Author(s):
- Harald Pittel (see profile)
- Date:
- 2021
- Group(s):
- American Studies, British History, Cultural Studies, English Literature, Gender Studies
- Subject(s):
- British literature, American literature--African American authors, Short stories, Feminism in literature, Black people in literature, Women in literature, Women authors, English literature--Women authors
- Item Type:
- Article
- Permanent URL:
- https://doi.org/10.17613/2cts-aa41
- Abstract:
- The pre-publication praise Natasha Brown received for her debut novel Assembly (2021) from renowned writers like Bernardine Evaristo or Ali Smith is quite remarkable. The author had been virtually unknown to the larger public before winning one of the London Writers Awards in the literary fiction category in 2019. As a young Black British woman of Jamaican descent, Brown meets the criteria defined by Spread the Word, the organisation behind the Awards assisting underrepresented writers to develop and publish their work, with an overall aim of reflecting diversity and enabling inclusivity. Assembly highlights the discriminating intersections of race, gender and class in today’s Britain and tells a story of social ascendancy, of a Black female narrator-protagonist who has overcome her lower-class background and has managed to obtain a top position in a London-based finance company. While this partially invites an autobiographical reading – Brown, who holds a Cambridge degree in mathematics, also made her career in the finance industry – Assembly is a far cry from celebrating the glory of making it to the top and instead exposes this goal as utterly questionable.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Journal article
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 8 months ago
- License:
- Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
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