Reconfiguring Feminism: Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other

“Their Spidery Self”: On Webs of Subject-Object Empathy in Bernardine Evaristo’s Fiction

“…38 In addition to this, as Sarıkaya-Şen shows in her analysis of Girl, Woman, Other, the novel's "networked structure exposes transtemporal and transnational patterns of diversity, connectedness and relationality, as well as the distinctive genealogy of black British women and their maternal empowerment." 39 While I agree with Sarıkaya-Şen's conclusions, I also believe that in calling attention to the multiplicity of "others" whose life events -both quotidian and intimate, routine and disruptive, personal and collective -are intersected and blended with the destinies of diasporic multitudes, Evaristo's best-known "fusion fiction" also foregrounds a Latourian compositionist logic, which renders the purity of self-contained ontologies ineffectual, while rethinking the perimeter of selfhood as contiguous with the otherness of human and nonhuman actants. 40 In Latour's compositionist manifesto, seminal for the notion that subjectivity is an aggregate of "quasi-objects, quasi-subjects," 41 which have to be put together (Latin componere) while retaining their heterogeneity.…”