Critically Black: Contemporary Black British Dramatists and Theatre in the New Millennium

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This research offers detailed comparative and critical attention to the impact upon contemporary British drama, of new millennial indigenous black writers: Kwame Kwei-Armah, debbie tucker green, Lemn Sissay and Roy Williams. To date, only a handful of anthology and journal articles have considered the contribution of black drama to UK drama and literary heritage, let alone this recent influential coterie. Monographs relevant to the field have either omitted neo-millennial dramatists, focused upon specific historical periods (staging slavery, Ira Aldridge), considered women practitioners only, or else mentioned drama in relation to other predominant genres (novels, life-writing, poetry or their adaptation for theatre) and British Asian writing. My task is shaped by four intentions: (i) to contribute to a critical infrastructure that interrupts the legacy of disappearance characterising black people's drama in British theatre and literary historiographies and hence, establish a problematised continuum; (ii) to extend theorization developed in other disciplines (film, television, music) and genres (novels, poetry) through engaging specifically with the field of drama: its live performance endpoint and as published text; developing an inter-referential methodology which better considers these texts as both printed and performed embodiments of words, taking into account the experiential and linguistic knowledge they create and the production contexts which influence this (iii) to make thematic links between the dramas through tackling issues of form, genre, aesthetics and performance strategies by offering analyses of theatricalised concerns and complexities around: language, family, violence and victimhood, diasporic and indigenous identities, universality and sociological inevitability (iv) to recognise the grip of genre and its traps--social realism and postcoloniality--and their stifling effect upon an emerging black British drama aesthetic, as filtered through two influential receptive contexts: theatre critics and the academy.My theorising of these writer's aesthetics foregrounds a further marginality, dramatisations of: black lesbian, queer and mixed-race experiences and the care system. Substantial socio-cultural commentary exists regarding mixedness, the care system and trans-racial family structures. However, performance and literary analysis lags behind in examining creative representations of these experiences. If theatre is to serve the indigenous multi-cultures that constitute contemporary Britain, the building and sustaining of a critical infrastructure, through retrieving and assessing black people's drama contributions is vital. Euro-centric and Western aesthetic principles have dominated performance and literary criticism as definitive indicators of quality, smothering potential for alternative aesthetic identifications and forms of articulation evident in recent contemporary writing. I focus upon work which sidesteps these impediments, notably through analysing tucker green's radical dramatic-poetics and mondrama's formal theatricalising of spoken-word performance strategies in relation to black British cultural self-fashioning, exploring the legacies identifiable from both European and African traditions. My research culminates in the monograph titled, Critically Black: Black British Dramatists and Theatre in the New Millennium. Its six chapters provide theatrical, literary and socio-historical frameworks for analysis of the profiled dramatists' inheritances. It draws together research I have been undertaking into this field over the past six years featuring ongoing dialogue with the dramatists and their peers through interviews and publications. Selective reference to their contemporaries (black and white) elicits comparisons and contrasts that testify to the noteworthy transformations black British dramatists' work has effected to conceptions of contemporary indigenous British drama both at home and abroad.