“Home had a way of shifting”: Cosmopolitan belonging in Diana Evans’s 26a

Abstract

Diana Evans’s debut novel, 26a (first published in 2005) follows the fortunes of Hunter twins Bess and Georgia, the daughters of a white English father and Nigerian mother, and examines their relationship in the context of their parents’ troubled marriage and Georgia’s struggle with mental illness. In doing so, the book explores the cosmopolitan movements of second-generation black British subjects, as the twins and their sisters move across and between the temporal spaces of England, Nigeria and the Caribbean. This article discusses 26a’s exploration of multi-locational cosmopolitan subjectivity through the various journeys each sister undertakes, and argues that this charting of the sisters’ differing engagements with diaspora casts aside paradigmatic 20th-century racial identities, leading to a rendering of a cosmopolitanism that is both mobile and yet circumscribed, and imaginatively reshapes black British histories.