The Plantation Nation: Imaginations of Post-National Britain in the plays of Earl Lovelace, Mustapha Matura and Dennis Scott

This collaborative doctoral project between Central and the National Theatre's Black Plays Archive (BPA) will generate an original account of the development of post-colonial British nationhood from the 1960s to the 1980s, rooted in the now mainly unknown plays of Earl Lovelace, Mustapha Matura and Dennis Scott. The project will retrieve a Caribbean strand of Black British playwriting that is now usually overlooked. It will also develop a critique of accounts of British national identity that over-emphasise whiteness and fail to account for the nation's colonial construction through the exemplary case of the economic structures, racialised relations and lived experiences of British-Caribbean plantation societies, that were fundamental to the nation and yet positioned outside it. Using the work of Lovelace, Matura, and Scott to develop a reparative history of the multiple cultural translations that constituted Britishness in its colonial phase.