Lyric Discourse and Contemporary Black British Literature

Abstract: This article traces the lyric as an expressive and interior mode across three contemporary Black British texts. Through an exploration of the quiet expressivities of Victoria Adukwei Bulley's poetry collection Quiet (2022), I theorize "lyric discourse" as a framework that speaks to the simultaneously collective, polyvocal, and deeply individual embodied experiences of Black British identity. I apply this lyric frame to debbie tucker green's one-woman play random (2008) and Natasha Brown's novel Assembly (2021) to demonstrate the pervasiveness of the plurivocal as prismatically inflected within the singular lyric voice as a feature of Black British lyric writing across genre. I posit that despite the limiting exigencies of expressivity, the discursive lyric voice foments formal and generic aporias within contemporary Black British literature and performances that speak to and from the paradoxical simultaneities of Black British identity as collectively held and singularly inflected. Ultimately, I argue that these lyric aporias hold open discursive space in which contemporary Black British women writers strategically gesture toward an individual and communal identity irreducible within contemporary literary forms.