A Black Bridget Jones? Candice Carty-Williams’s Queenie (2019): Challenging Discourses of Race and Gender in the Chick-Lit Genre

Abstract

Candice Carty-Williams's best-selling debut novel Queenie (2019) has been marketed and reviewed as the story of a Black Bridget Jones. This comparison has been challenged by readers and critics alike, even though it was drawn by Carty-Williams herself. The fact that Carty-Williams chose a comparison to a marketing label that is still frequently belittled and often ignored altogether by critics to preclude another labelling practice based on her ethnicity speaks volumes not only about the whiteness of the British book industry, but also the lasting popular appeal of chick lit, whose death has been proclaimed numerous times since the days of Bridget Jones. This article argues that Carty Williams's novel has adapted the chick-lit formula that became famous with Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary (1996), assimilated some genre conventions, and even openly hints at its intertext in places. However, Queenie has innovatively politicised this formula by subverting the neoliberal and postfeminist elements that dominated the narratives of many white chick-lit texts of the 1990s and early 2000s through an overt focus on racism in its many forms, but foremostly in the fields of dating and relationships. Through its exploration of the intersections of race, class, and gender, Queenie is an important and timely contribution to the tradition of Black female writing in Britain, as well as to the chick-lit genre.