Re-baptizing the World in Our Own Terms: Black Theatre and Live Arts in Britain

Abstract

It wasn’t until the mid-1970s that the BBC, bastion of “balanced” broadcasting, decided it was time to take The Black and White Minstrel Show off the air. This program, based on the first American theatre tradition, says more about the hegemony of a colonial fantasy constructed in the nineteenth century as part of a racist ideology than about the Black subject. In this Eurocentric discourse, we were always more body than mind, and Black cultural traditions were represented as homogeneous, marginal to the European canon, unsophisticated derivatives of Western forms and traditions. This historical, cultural and political background provides a critical framework for discussing Black theatre as developed and practised in a British context. This framework facilitates a critique of Black theatre, live art (that is, performance art) and related practices, in the context of a postcolonial discourse. While the term “Black” has been defined politically, in other studies, to include the African Caribbean, Southeast Asian, Chinese and other communities of colour, signifying the shared experiences of colonialism and political resistance to it; in the present context, “Black theatre” refers to theatre of African Caribbean origin.