“I ain’t British though / Yes you are. You’re as English as I am”: Staging Belonging and Unbelonging in Black British Drama

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Osborne, Deirdre. 2011. “I ain’t British though / Yes you are. You’re as English as I am”: Staging Belonging and Unbelonging in Black British Drama. In: Ulrike Lindner; Mark Mohring; Mark Stein and Silke Stroh, eds. Hybrid Cultures, Nervous States: Britain and Germany in a (Post)Colonial World. (129) Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, pp. 203-227. ISBN 978-90-420-3228-6 [Book Section]

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Official URL: http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?BookId=CC+129

Abstract or Description

A sample of neo-millennial plays by male, black, British dramatists is briefly discussed: novelist and playwright Courttia Newland’s A Question of Courage from White Open Spaces: Seven Plays About Race and Belonging in the Countryside (2006), actor and writer Lennie James’s international commission, The Sons of Charlie Paora (2004) and Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads (2002) and Joe Guy (2007) by the most prolific black playwright in Britain today, Roy Williams. Each play foregrounds social negotiations through the prism of race, centralising black characters - or brown characters in the example of James’s play - and dramatising their interactions with members of the white-majority contexts they inhabit. They attend to traditional spaces of social exclusion (housing estate ghettoisation), problematic geographical and demographical spaces (the English countryside, ex-colonies) and also to the specific kind of visibility for black people in cultural institutions (sport).

Item Type:

Book Section

Keywords:

rural, urban, Black Britishness, monodrama, unbelonging

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Theatre and Performance (TAP)

Dates: