Confronting representation
Sarah Shaffi asks whether representation could ever offer more than tokenism
Notable by Sarah Shaffi | Originally published in the print edition, April 24th 2026
A historical crime novel reckoning with the aftermath of the First World War and the independence movement. A collection of short stories, some bizarre, some disturbing, all captivating. A chronicle of a single day in America, telling the stories of 10 children killed by guns. A journey through the history of Black Britain. A magical children’s adventure following a girl determined to save her father, and the land in which she lives. A crime novel about a forensics genius on the Caribbean island of Camaho.
Reading these books – A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee, Speak Gigantular by Irenosen Okojie, Another Day in the Death of America by Gary Younge, Black Britain by David Olusoga, The Girl of Ink & Stars by Kiran Millwood Hargrave, and The Bone Readers by Jacob Ross – has been a chance to read excellent literature, 10 years on from their being shortlisted for the first ever Jhalak Prize. Each book is as entertaining and remarkable as it was 10 years ago, and each book still stands today, feeling relevant to our current and future conversations.
“The definition of representation has, like the word diversity, morphed and been bastardised”
But this revisiting has also led to a lot of questions. What does this set of fiction and non-fiction books say, individually, and as a collection? Did their authors set out to say something about identity, about who they are, and where they come from? Who, if anyone, are these books speaking to and speaking for? And do these books represent something? It’s that last which has occupied most of my thoughts, and made me confront a battle I’ve been having with questions around representation for years.
Perhaps I first began to think about representation seriously – whether a person or a piece of art can be representative, what it means to represent – just before the winner of that first Jhalak Prize was announced, when a well-known white woman writer reviewed The Secret Lives of the Amir Sisters, the first novel by Great British Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain, written with Ayisha Malik. It’s a review that will forever live in my memory; the writer lamented that there was “only so much shelf space to go around”, questioning whether Hussain had a right to take up that space (a question not posed about the myriad of books by white celebrities). More galling still was the reviewer’s observation that she “was hoping for insights into a culture” she didn’t understand as well as she’d like, as if that was the primary function of a book by a writer from the global majority: to educate those in the West about the “quirks” of our cultures, and to show how different we are.
The idea that writing by people from the global majority exists to educate white people gives me, as modern parlance perfectly sums up, the ick. It’s a feeling that’s only intensified as ideas of representation have bled from literature and culture into life, and that discomfort cements for me the idea of representation as now meaningless.
The expected reception to the rise of politicians such as Priti Patel, Sajid Javid and Rishi Sunak is a prime example of that meaninglessness. A well-known radio presenter hailed the cabinet containing Patel and Javid as a “very visible example of representation”, with other respected brown journalists chiming in about the symbolism of the moment. The Cambridge Dictionary first defines representation as “a person or organisation that speaks, acts, or is present officially for someone else”, and as such, all our politicians are representatives, tasked with voting and making decisions on our behalf.
But the definition of representation has, like the word diversity, morphed and been bastardised, and in current shorthand implies that having someone “like us” visible, particularly in any sort of public life, a positive. With the usual subtlety of modern discourse, it seems to mean that I should be grateful to have people that look a little like me in positions of power, or creating art, without any deeper questions about their values or ideas – the simple fact of their ethnic identity should be enough to satisfy me.
At the end of the opening story, ‘Gunk’, of Speak Gigantular, Okojie writes:
Fuck governments.
Fuck systems
Fuck everything that tells you if you’re good you’ll be valued.
As I read those sentences, it was a reminder that representation is, in a way, another system; it’s an easy way to put us in boxes, another way in which we can be marginalised, a chance for the institutional to tell themselves the job of inclusivity is done.
And so, as I finished those six Jhalak Prize books, I have come to the conclusion they only represent one thing: great stories, factual and fictional, that capture our thoughts and imaginations. That’s an idea of representation I can get on board with.
Sarah Shaffi is a freelance journalist and is deputy editor of the Jhalak Review