Contemporary Black and Asian Women Playwrights in Britain. By Gabriele Griffin. Cambridge Studies in Modern Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; pp. x + 291. $75 cloth.

2005 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-319
Author(s):  
Meenakshi Ponnuswami
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Asian Women ◽  
Women Playwrights ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Feminist Theatre ◽  
Black British ◽  
Stuart Hall ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
Paul Gilroy ◽  
Comprehensive Study

Gabriele Griffin's study of black and Asian women playwrights in contemporary Britain fills a gap in British theatre studies. Although a comprehensive study of black British theatre has yet to see print, two developments have, in the past decade or so, begun to stimulate critical attention in the field. One is the publication of plays by black and Asian authors, including collections of plays exclusively by women (such as Khadija George's edition of Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers of 1993), as well as the more systematic inclusion of works by writers such as Winsome Pinnock and Trish Cooke in anthologies of plays by new British dramatists. A second is the work of British cultural-studies scholars and sociologists during the same period, which has offered theatre historians some new approaches and challenges: Kobena Mercer's Welcome to the Jungle (1994); Catherine Ugwu's Let's Get It On (1995); Baker et al.'s Black British Cultural Studies (1996); Heidi Mirza's edited volume Black British Feminism (1997)—not to mention a vast body of work by Stuart Hall, Avtar Brah, Paul Gilroy, and others. Still, as Griffin notes at the outset, while immigrant and second-generation novels and films have received attention and accolades, black British theatre has tended to be ignored except by a handful of feminist theatre scholars.

Censoring the Uncensored: the Case of ‘Children in Uniform’

2000 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 219-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
John F. Deeney
Keyword(s):  
New Work ◽  
Women Playwrights ◽  
Culturally Specific ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Critical Success ◽  
Area Of Interest ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University ◽  
The Relationship

British theatre between the two world wars has been a neglected area of interest for contemporary scholars and theatre historians, but a growing body of work in this field has of late begun to challenge the orthodoxies. Much of the new work has focused on the reclamation and repositioning of the work of ‘forgotten’ women playwrights and commercially successful gay playwrights such as Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan. Here, John Deeney examines how the Lord Chamberlain's licensing of Christa Winsloe's lesbian-themedChildren in Uniform, and the commercial and critical success of its production at the Duchess Theatre in 1932–33, invites a reassessment of the possibilities open to women playwrights for exploring ‘deviancy’; and how contemporary theoretical positions too frequently ignore the challenge of the historically and culturally specific. John Deeney is Lecturer and Course Director in Theatre Studies at the University of Ulster at Coleraine. He is the editor ofWriting Live: an Investigation of the Relationship between Writing and Live Art(New Playwrights Trust, 1998) and a contributor to the forthcomingWomen, Theatre and Performance: New Histories/New Historiographies(Manchester University Press) andBritish Theatre between the Wars(Cambridge University Press).

Paul Gilroy and Communication Studies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Armond Towns
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
White Men ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Elements ◽  
The World ◽  
Stuart Hall ◽  
Paul Gilroy ◽  
Absent Presence

Paul Gilroy is a central figure in British cultural studies. From There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack to Darker than Blue, his work has consistently interrogated what the political means for cultural studies, particularly with an eye toward making the world anew at some point in the near future. Indeed, Gilroy’s work suggests that the construct of the “political,” for cultural studies, has at least two interrelated meanings, both future-focused: (1) the political involves one form of investigation as a mode of entering into the conjunctural analysis; and (2) the political is also a nod toward black futurities as a mode of forever transforming said conjuncture. First, as noted by Stuart Hall, the cultural studies scholar has the responsibility to “necessarily abstract” from the conjuncture to begin an analysis. What this means is, whereas disciplinary scholarship focuses on the cultural, social, economic, or the political as set boundaries, the cultural studies scholar can begin with the political, in the first instance, and this may (or may not) lead to an investigation of the social, economic, or cultural elements of the conjuncture. This is an inherent element of the interdisciplinary approach of cultural studies. For Gilroy, nationalism and fascism are political constructs that he begins with, in the first instance. These political constructs, then, disproportionately lead to questions of racism and colonialism, which are disproportionately left out of the larger British cultural studies project. Gilroy’s career outlines a position that arguably has changed very little in contemporary British cultural studies: that white men are largely the gatekeepers of what constitutes cultural studies, many of whom completely ignore race in their theorizations of nationalism and fascism, even when it serves as an absent presence. Further, this liberal position of cultural studies requires intervention. Thus, second, and as noted by Lawrence Grossberg, the political for cultural studies also assumes that one’s work should do something in the world; it should seek to forever transform the conjuncture. In short, cultural studies is not just a theoretical exercise, but it is about telling a “better story” that can lead to transformation in the world. Indeed, Gilroy’s treatise on “racelessness,” often considered a nod toward colorblindness, is actually his attempt to speak the world anew. Put differently, Gilroy’s project has always been concerned with “routes” toward a new construct of humanism to disrupt Western engagements with the human. Despite its potential for white liberalism, then, Gilroy views cultural studies as uniquely positioned to speak the world anew, to challenge the solidity of the Western human and its connections to the Western nation. This, for Gilroy, requires rethinking the future, not through Karl Marx’s communist future, but Frantz Fanon’s decolonial future. In short, black futurities are everyone’s future.

Feminist Views on the English Stage: Women Playwrights, 1990–2000. By Elaine Aston. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; pp. 238. $75 cloth.

2005 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-155
Author(s):  
Alicia Tycer
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Women Playwrights ◽  
Women's Voices ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Feminist Theatre ◽  
English Stage ◽  
Prevailing View

Elaine Aston begins Feminist Views on the English Stage by pondering why, given the optimism for English feminist theatre at the close of the 1980s, the 1990s saw a diminishing interest in women's voices. She asks, “If ‘masculinity and its discontents’ culturally and theatrically moved centre stage in the 1990s, what happened to women and to feminism?”(5) In order to counteract the prevailing view of the 1990s as a decade dominated by the overarching theme of “masculinity in crisis,” she focuses her book on women playwrights. Aston detects a theatrical backlash against the partial advances made by women playwrights during the 1980s, mirroring a backlash against feminism within popular culture in general. In contrast to the “shock fests” of the reemergent “angry young men,” who have often been charged with nihilism, she argues that the works she examines remain politically engaged. Aston explains that Feminist Views is motivated by her desire to prevent women playwrights from being “written out” of the theatrical record.

Frottage

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keguro Macharia
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Queer Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Diaspora ◽  
Diaspora Studies ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
Black British ◽  
Stuart Hall ◽  
Rene Maran ◽  
Paul Gilroy

“Frottage” elaborates a conceptual framework for the book. It describes how black diasporic geohistories reframe queer studies and how queer studies, in turn, reframe black diaspora studies. I identify three key terms in black diaspora studies: kinship, hybridity, and thinghood. Dominant approaches in black diaspora studies have framed the black diaspora as a search for kinship, whether biological or fictive, creating what I describe as a genealogical imperative for black diasporic intellectual and cultural production. Attempting to redress this genealogical imperative, and the racial and ethnic policing it produces, scholars including Stuart Hall, Hazel Carby, and Paul Gilroy advanced the concept of hybridity, arguing that the cultural promiscuities produced through immigration and urbanization offered a way to imagine blackness as strategic and coalitional, rather than biological and ethnic. As the concept of hybridity moved from its black British context to the United States, it was appropriated by a genealogical imperative that privileged biological mixing as a “solution” to the problem of ethno-racial antagonisms. Thus, “hybridity” became a hetero-reproductive structure. I break from this genealogical imperative by arguing that “thinghood,” as theorized by Hortense Spillers and Fred Moten, provides an alternative paradigm for theorizing black being. I argue that “thinghood” is the central challenge that black diaspora studies poses for queer studies. The chapter introduces the four key figures in the book: Frantz Fanon, René Maran, Jomo Kenyatta, and Claude McKay.

Diasporas with a Difference: Jewish and Georgian Teenagers’ Ethnic Identity in the Russian Federation

1997 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-353
Author(s):  
Fran Markowitz
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Russian Federation ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Stuart Hall ◽  
The Russian Federation

Ever since the late 1960s, when Fredrik Barth urged us to move away from the idea that ethnicity is constituted by “cultural stufT and to focus instead on the boundary that demarcates groups, anthropologists (and their perhaps more radical half-siblings in cultural studies) have cast into doubt the primordial or essentialist nature of ethnic groups, to say nothing of ethnic identity. Earlier studies focused on the groups themselves—how they display and are constrained by their identity as immigrants, minorities, ethnics, “persistent peoples,” and even “marginal men” (sic)—while more recent investigations have taken up the “borderlands” where groups meet, confront each other (Rosaldo; Rouse), and become zones of hybridized cultural production (Bhabha). In a related vein, ethnicity is also explored as one of many possible intersections of power and culture, and ethnic identity becomes a crazy-quilt of namings and “being-called” (Probyn 25). Indeed, Stuart Hall informs us that “identities are never unified, and in late modem times, increasingly fragmented and fractured, never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic discourses, practices and positions” (4, emphasis added).

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