Olivia Simone Griffith  (KCL) - 2024-25 Students
olivia.griffith@kcl.ac.uk

Magic! It’s real and it’s political: Exploring precolonial spiritualities in magical realist fiction by Anglophone African-Caribbean diasporic women writers.

My work aims to explore how magical realism by Anglophone African-Caribbean diasporic women writers works to excavate indigenous and precolonial ontologies – investigating how indigneous African-Caribbean thought-systems have informed the ‘magic’ of such works. A major part of this project involves writing my own magical realist novel – drawing on Indigenous Kalinago and precolonial West African knowledges to shape my narrative. As a result, I intend to capture the sociopolitical importance of magical realism for subaltern voices – highlighting how this literary mode rewrites colonial accounts of the Caribbean, disrupts Eurocentric narratives concerning queer Black identities, and reimagines new paths to liberation.

Principal Supervisor: Mr Edmund Gordon