It is contrary to this common perception that this essay discusses Which have often been described as middle-class-centred in terms of their charactersĪnd implied values. More specifically, "communication breakdown" according to Sedlmayr is often due to socio-cultural divisions perceived as unbridgeable when working-class experience is alienated from the dominant culture and when the neoliberal state's attempts to maintain hegemony by consent are unsuccessful (Sedlmayr 2019, 35-40 41).Īrguably, one would not expect such a class-sensitive outlook from Smith's novels, It is in this sense that Gerold Sedlmayr (2019) has argued that "communication breakdown" figures largely in recent British literature, and it deserves attention that this focus typically reflects class conflicts. In my view, the crisis of citizenship as perceived by Smith can also be described as a crisis of communication, a word that is often divorced from its original meaning – to communicate: to make common to many, to impart (Williams 1985, 72) – and reduced to one-way processes. real participation and uncritically cling to ill-founded administrative regulations. This portrayal amounts to a dark outlook of an atomised and disorientated postpolitical society whose citizens show little interest in. The novels that make up Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet are often highlighted as epitomes of Brexit fiction or "BrexLit" (Shaw 2018) and they depict present-day Britain as fractured: "a line you don't cross here, a line you better don't cross there" (Smith 2016, 61). 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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