Performance and Ethnicity in Contemporary Spain: Agency and Resistance (1990 to the present day).

In the last fifteen years, Spain has experienced an influx of migrants and the establishment of diasporic communities on a scale comparable to the cases of Britain, France and Germany in the middle of the twentieth century. What was a nation of emigration - to Latin America a century ago, to central Europe in the 1950s - has become a place to which many people from across the globe come in search of work and refuge. In addition to those from former colonies, there are now large numbers of people from North and sub-Saharan Africa, China and Pakistan who have settled in Spain. The increasing prominence of these diaspora in everyday life, their impact on the body politic, and the direct exposure of native Spaniards to their cultures have triggered debate in public and private about the Spanish nation and the singularly white, European (and Catholic) ethnicity that is, according to some, indigenous to its territory.

Because the establishment of sizeable diasporic communities in Spain occurred only recently, the impact on cultural production in Spain of residents of foreign origin has been slight. Nevertheless, an increasing number of films, plays, novels, songs and other artworks are now being produced by these groups or involve them in some way in order to explore issues stemming from their presence in Spain. In parallel, scholarly studies have appeared on the artistic representation of non-white people in contemporary Spanish culture and of issues such as immigration and multiculturalism.

This existing literature is limited in scope in that it examines only individual genres. My project, of which the AHRC Fellowship will form part, is more inclusive in its cross-disciplinary focus on performance and the meanings inscribed on the performer's body. Its preliminary studies include analyses of how the 'fact' (as Fanon described it) of blackness of actors of African origin in Spain affects the roles in which they are cast, and of performances by 'white' Spanish actors in blackface.

The Fellowship will build upon this initial research by exploring how members of the African diaspora in Spain can, by means of performance, assume agency and implement strategies of resistance in the face of political subjugation and discrimination on account of the colour of their skin. This will result in two academic articles, the publication of interviews with performers and a series of theatre workshops.

In the first part of the Fellowship, I will examine the work of two rap musicians of the African diaspora: Frank T (Tshimini Nsombolay), born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and El Chojín (Domingo Edjang Moreno), son of a Guinean father and Spanish mother. These rappers routinely comment in their songs and their prose writings on their own hybrid identities and on the issue of racial prejudice more generally. The planned article will analyse not only studio recordings of their songs, but also how these two rap musicians exploit live performance and its potential for direct interaction with audiences to raise awareness of and provoke debate on 'race' and ethnic difference. To this end, interviews with these musicians will be arranged following initial research on the topic.

The second part of the Fellowship will initially run parallel to the first part. From September, I will organise and run a series of weekly workshops as a volunteer at the Centro Hispano Africano in Madrid, a social centre founded to provide migrants from sub-Saharan Africa with personal, professional and legal assistance and to facilitate integration and intercultural exchange. Over the course of the workshops, I will introduce participants to techniques of Theatre of the Oppressed and encourage them to reflect on and explore through performance some of the problems that affect directly their everyday lives as Africans in Spain. The impact of these theatre activities on participants will be determined by means of questionnaires and discussion sessions.

Both of the component projects of the Fellowship will benefit directly the African community in Spain, especially that in Madrid. The study of rap musicians Frank T and El Chojín will raise their international reputation by bringing their recorded output, live performances and role as spokesmen for a generation of people of African origin in Spain to the attention of specialists in contemporary Hispanic culture and society as well as scholars of contemporary popular music in the English-speaking world. This will be accomplished by the publication of my analysis and of my interviews with them in journals to which academic institutions in the USA, UK and Spain subscribe. The series of theatre workshops that I will run at the Centro Hispano Africano in Madrid, it is intended, will strengthen participants' awareness that they can respond constructively to discrimination and will provide users of the centre with a set of theatrical tools that can be employed in order to present and reflect collaboratively upon possible actions to be taken if they experience prejudice.

By acknowledging and supporting the agency of those marginalised on account of the colour of their skin in Spain, the two parts of the Fellowship will also impact indirectly on the Spanish society of which these communities form part, aiding cooperation between diaspora and the indigenous population and integration of these two groups without compromising the former's ethnic identity. I will publish my description and assessment of the value of the workshops and those obstacles to progress encountered during the series in a journal read by academics and practitioners in Spain for future reference by those working in the broader field of Theatre for Development.