Old Wine in a New Bottle or Vice Versa? Winsome Pinnock’s Interstitial Poetics

Abstract

In her critical anthology on black and Asian British theatre Alternatives Within the Mainstream: British Black and Asian Theatres (2006), Dimple Godiwala makes a dynamic and impressive claim about the central position of black and Asian dramatists and theatre practitioners in contemporary British culture.1 Drawing on Bourdieu’s sociological theory, Godiwala creates a strong locus for diasporic/interstitial writers and artists as the best qualified to tackle the heterogeneity of contemporary British culture. In this upgrading process, she rejects the ‘postcolonial’ as a ‘now tired term’, which, being relational to colonialism, perpetuates a subordinate understanding of all other cultures by the Eurocentric ‘doxa’.2 In highly hierarchical countries, like Britain, this has led to the institutionalization of racism and a peculiar ‘tokenization’ of the black artist.3 It is precisely the role of the diasporic/interstitial subject to fill in what exist as lacunae in the indigenous British subject’s ‘doxic field’.4