Reading Intimacy in Contemporary Short Stories by Black British Women

Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s critique of intimacy as only being recognised as a set of normative associations, this thesis answers to, mobilises and expands the critical possibilities which Berlant’s ‘minor intimacies’ open for the reformulation of the term. This study explores ‘minor’ articulations of intimacy through ‘minor’ uses of the short story by three contemporary black British writers: Zadie Smith, Jackie Kay, and Bernardine Evaristo. This thesis is divided in three chapters, each focusing on one formulation of intimacy: ‘resistant intimacies’, ‘imaginative intimacies’ and ‘ephemeral intimacies’. Through my textual analysis and my engagements with critical figures, I highlight the transformative potential of critically-informed reading to imagine alternative forms of living affectively.
I examine ‘resistant intimacies’ in three of Smith’s migrant short stories: ‘Martha, Martha’ (2005), The Embassy of Cambodia (2013), and ‘Kelso Deconstructed’ (2019). I expose the limitations and the discriminations of different articulations of the global to highlight how these intervene in the everyday reality of Smith’s characters. I argue that Smith’s stories optimistically orient readers to resist normative formulations of intimacy through critically-engaged reading. Through my notion of ‘imaginative intimacies’, I identify and develop Kay’s continued reimagination of loss through selected stories across her collections: Why Don’t You Stop Talking (2002), Wish I Was Here (2006), and Reality, Reality (2012). I focus on the ‘minor’ potential of the imaginative to develop progressive understandings of intimacy. I map Evaristo’s ‘fusion fiction’ in Girl, Woman, Other (2019) to the short story cycle to argue that she locates transformative possibilities for intimacy in ephemeral but ‘minor’ situations of feminist exchange, which I refer to as ‘ephemeral intimacies’. Ultimately, this thesis illustrates how through the resistant, the imaginative and the ephemeral, Smith, Kay and Evaristo reimagine intimacy and reorient it towards a new ‘minor’ politics of intimacy.