Between 2013 and 2015, Malorie Blackman was Britain’s first black children’s laureate. Her young adult series Noughts and Crosses (2001-21) at once challenges and plays with the prevailing racial ordering of western life and thought.
Blackman’s series is set in an alternative Britain called Albion, where power is held by a dominant, black majority known as the “Crosses”, while the white “Noughts” are stigmatised minority subjects. In doing so, Blackman suggests that if we see difference as threatening or inferior, then any alternative worlds we imagine will just reflect our own culture. The upending of racial formations, the books seem to suggest, could result in an equally powerful, reverse form of oppression.
Most contemporary criticism and the book’s most well-known adaptations (at the Royal Shakespeare Company and for the BBC) treat Blackman’s series as a case study of anti-racist political allegory, counterfactual historical, or dystopian fiction. Their focus tends to be on the forbidden romance between Callum McGregor, an increasingly disaffected and conflicted working-class Nought, and a Cross politician’s wealthy and privileged daughter, Persephone “Sephy” Hadley.
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