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

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.

As the non-academic audiences for my work will be the theatre-going and general public (including young people in arts and educational contexts), those with an interest in spoken-word poetry, poetry in performance, practitioners and writers, this research's impact will be to enhance general cultural awareness of black British dramatic-poetics and also present a new cultural experience for readers and writers in how the distinctive textuality might be explored and interpreted. It will benefit pools of knowledge concerning: the creative output and important role black British writing plays in contemporary British culture; the transformative implications of black dramatists' work to theatre-going and performance, notably in the light of the Arts Council's Race Equality Plan (2005) and Sustained Theatre initiative. My research provides academic and activist expertise for contemporary theatre by strengthening and deepening the quality of discussions relating to black citizens' cultural visibility in the UK and abroad, providing a focus, recognition and point of reference as their work enters other avenues of reading besides performance - particularly abroad. Abroad, the research underpins drama historiography and critical introductions I produce for theatre companies on the writers (Kwei-Armah, Sissay), their peers (Adebayo, SuAndi) for international productions/tours of their work in theatres, schools, and community settings.(Baltimore US, South Africa, Botswana, Malawi, Australia). Thus a direct interface is created between informing production teams, the wider public and reinforcing the writers' pre-eminent positions in re-framing conceptualisations about British culture and heritage. The impact is identifiable in the fact that their work is now taught and performed in a number of African countries producing knowledge across two distinctive sites of African diasporic culture: Britain and the countries on the African continent. I am considered to be instrumental in this by a number of the writers themselves. The exposure my research offers their work benefits the writers and anyone seeking critical information on this indigenous generation of black dramatists. It creates not only intellectual capital for the field but is a resource about contemporary black drama in British theatre, consolidating interactive thinking about black- and white-led traditions. Through some public engagement activities in the UK, my research will contribute to knowledge and quality of life. I will convene a public platform with black dramatists (National Theatre Studio/Black Theatre Archive and Society for Theatre Research, 2011) to continue the forum of public discussion I established in March (2010), enabling opportunities for non-drama specialists to directly particpate in debates about the field. Future projections of impact beyond the academy include developing critical writing workshops for young people about drama, in collaboration with the Arvon Foundation and Spread-the-Word to make an intervention into longevity impediments and to encourage young people's contributions to a critical mass, of work that speaks to them. This compliments my pedagogical determination to increase the visibility of black people's input into discursive arenas and to keep these dramatists' works in the public eye through creating accessible knowledge networks through partnership with established public sector arts organisations. My ongoing work with Apple 'n' Snakes (I am collaborating in its archiving and heritage access for young people), the new Black Arts Alliance and SABLE lit.mag for new black writing, mean that activities building upon my research (as relevant to their creative programmes), are planned for 2011. The impact overwhelmingly is that my research enhances public engagement regarding critique and reception of the dramatists' work and the field of black