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

这项研究详细地比较和批判性地关注了新千禧一代土著黑人作家夸梅·奎伊-阿尔马、黛比·塔克·格林、莱曼·西赛和罗伊·威廉姆斯对当代英国戏剧的影响。到目前为止，只有少数选集和期刊文章考虑过黑人戏剧对英国戏剧和文学遗产的贡献，更不用说最近这个有影响力的小圈子了。与这一领域相关的专著要么省略了关注特定历史时期(上演奴隶制，艾拉·奥尔德里奇)的新千年戏剧家，被认为只有女性从业者，要么提到与其他主要体裁(小说、生平写作、诗歌或它们改编成戏剧)和英属亚洲写作有关的戏剧。我的任务有四个目的：(I)为一个关键的基础设施做出贡献，这个基础设施中断了英国戏剧和文学史学中黑人戏剧消失的遗产，从而建立了一个有问题的连续体；(Ii)通过专门与戏剧领域的现场表演终点和出版文本接触，扩展在其他学科(电影、电视、音乐)和流派(小说、诗歌)中发展的理论化；开发一种相互参照的方法，更好地将这些文本视为文字的印刷和表演的化身，考虑到它们创造的经验和语言知识以及影响这一点的生产语境(Iii)通过处理形式、体裁、美学和表演策略的问题，在戏剧之间建立主题联系，方法是分析戏剧化的关切和围绕以下问题的复杂性：语言、家庭、暴力和受害者、散居和土著身份、普遍性和社会学必然性(Iv)认识到体裁及其陷阱--社会现实主义和后殖民主义--及其对新兴的英国黑人戏剧美学的扼杀作用，通过两个有影响力的接受语境：戏剧评论家和学术界。我对这些作家美学的理论展望了进一步的边缘化，戏剧化：黑人女同性恋、同性恋和混合种族的经历和关怀系统。关于混血儿、照料系统和跨种族家庭结构，存在着大量的社会文化评论。然而，表演和文学分析在考察这些经验的创造性表现方面落后于人。如果戏剧要服务于构成当代英国的本土多元文化，通过检索和评估黑人戏剧贡献来建设和维持关键基础设施是至关重要的。以欧洲为中心的和西方的美学原则一直主导着表演和文学批评，作为质量的决定性指标，扼杀了近年来当代写作中明显的另类审美认同和表达形式的可能性。我专注于避开这些障碍的作品，特别是通过分析塔克格林的激进戏剧诗学和单剧关于英国黑人文化自我塑造的口语表演策略的正式戏剧化，探索可以从欧洲和非洲传统中识别出的遗产。我的研究在题为《批判的黑人：新千年的英国黑人戏剧家和戏剧》的专著中达到了顶峰。它的六个章节为分析剧作家的遗产提供了戏剧、文学和社会历史框架。它汇集了我在过去六年中一直在这一领域进行的研究，通过采访和出版物与剧作家和他们的同行进行持续的对话。有选择地引用他们同时代的人(黑人和白人)引起的比较和对比，证明了英国黑人剧作家的作品对国内外当代英国本土戏剧观念的显著转变。

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.