A review by amyvl93
Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging by Afua Hirsch

challenging informative slow-paced

3.0

 Brit(ish) is part memoir, part history, part manifesto by Afua Hirsch, which was everywhere when it was first published a few years ago. I'm a little late to the party - but I'm still glad I read it. I found that some of the history that Hirsch recounts be similar to what I've read in other books, but there were things in here that took me by surprise (the media outcry over a black man being cast as Othello in the late 1990s for instance!) and I found Hirsch's personal narrative to be interesting, particularly in her looking for a community and home both within the UK and Africa, and reckoning with the impact of her reflective affluence on her experiences in comparison to those of her partners. I did feel that the narrative structure bounced around a bit which meant there was a bit of repetition and the strands of arguments were not always easy to follow - I would have also found a bit more reflection on her experience of her Jewish heritage interesting, it gets a relatively small mention, perhaps in keeping with Hirsch's argument that she is more visibly black and therefore that is her identity according to others, but that would have been interesting nonetheless.