A

Volume pubblicato con un contributo del Dipartimento di Lingue e LetteratureAnglo–Germaniche e Slave, Università degli Studi di Padova.

Black Arts in Britain

Literary visual performative

edited by

Annalisa OboeFrancesca Giommi

Copyright © MMXIARACNE editrice S.r.l.

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I edizione: dicembre

Contents

IntroductionFaces of contemporary BritainA O

The Location of Blackness in rd Millennium BritainF G

Black Subjects, British SubjectsIdentity and self–fashioning –L Y

A New British GrammarJackie Kay’s The Lamplighter ()A N

Pressure ()From Black Power to st–century British citizenshipA E

Swamping the CountryIngrid Pollard’s cartography of EnglishnessF C

Trading Faces onlineTransnational politics, intercultural practices and the performing artsA T

Dub Poets in Black BritainS P

Black Beauty in LondiniumBernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe ()C M G

Black Arts in Britain

Africa on My MindThe Black British architect David AdjayeE D, I V

Contemporary Slavery in the UK and Its CategoriesP D

Mixing it UpChallenging the myth of superiority and nationhood through storiesthat offer new perspectives on historyB E

Contributors

Black Arts in BritainISBN 978–88–548–4424–7DOI 10.4399/97888548442471pag. 7–12 (dicembre 2011)

IntroductionFaces of contemporary Britain

A O

England has changed. These days it’s difficultto tell who’s from around here and who’s not.Who belongs and who’s a stranger.

Caryl Phillips, A Distant Shore ()

Black Arts in Britain aims to provide a critical investigation of themulti–ethnic topography of British culture today. Its focus is on thearticulation of new, composite identities and forms of third millenniumcitizenship — as prefigured, for example, in Paul Gilroy’s idea of‘conviviality’ and in Stuart Hall’s vision of a ‘civic nationalism’ — andon an investigation of how all forms of creative expression may concurin telling, performing, dramatizing, staging, picturing and soundingcultural/ethnic/national ‘identity’. In an increasingly fruitful pairingbetween transculturality and interdisciplinarity, the essays offered herebring together perspectives from literature, cinema, theatre and thevisual arts that combine creativity and criticism, narrative patterns withperformative and visual strategies, often leading to the production oforiginal syncretized artistic formats that also offer new perspectiveson central questions in British culture.

Our work deals with contemporary time, the fast changing terrain ofthe present. It is always difficult to find the right words to describe orexplain what is going on now, at the same time as we live, and we needto register this difficulty right at the beginning of the book, alongsideother theoretical and methodological difficulties, like having to dealwith the use of descriptive labels — such as ‘black’ or ‘Black British’— to define fields of inquiry or life experiences which will never be

Annalisa Oboe

represented in satisfactory ways by such words, but which we keepusing for want of better alternatives.

The ‘black’ arts we talk about have nothing to do with dark matterslike magic, astrology, witchcraft and other mystical practices. Theyare rather the production of British artists who trace their genealogyback to Africa, the African diaspora, the Caribbean or other areasof the ex–colonial empire, and whose presence in Great Britain hassignificantly modified the way we think of the British socio–culturallandscape today.

The term ‘black’ is intended here as a loosely defined, adaptivesignifier, disconnected from essentialized notions of ‘race’. It is usedas a label that has served historically to focus on discourses that cutacross cultural, ethnic and national borders, and that in our view hasto be negotiated again and again and filled every time in differentways, so as to include a variety of marginal or minority or subalternsubjects, and also new forms of ethno–social living. But it is obviousthat ‘black’, as a descriptive tag, does take colour into account, andcontemporary artists of various and variously–mixed backgroundsuse it as both a problematic, critical starting point and an empoweringcreative strategy. This is forcefully conveyed, for example, in poet FredD’Aguiar’s account of his own life’s work:

The first thing you do as a black poet is unzip the suit of your black skin andwalk away from it. The second thing you do as a poet is find that suit of yoursthat fits you oh so well and step right back into it. That suit paints behindyour eyelids so you see it when you dream. That suit is osmotic: it lets outsweat, breathes for you — your biggest organ — and keeps out the elements.All history is in that skin. Poetry plays your skin like an instrument — listen,touch, taste, look, and sniff. Dream–skin. Skin–song. Human.

‘Black’ inevitably registers the racial structuring of the world, not inorder to support “a sociality of the skin” which, as David T. Goldberghas remarked, is one of threat, but to creatively challenge and lay bare

. F. D’Aguiar’s online bio–profile, available at http://www.english.vt.edu/graduate/faculty.html.

. D. T. Goldberg, The Threat of Race. Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism, Oxford:Blackwell, , pp. –.

Introduction

the existing cultural or philosophical beliefs sustaining the idea itselfof ‘race’.

Our critical discourse finds its roots in this view and aims to zoomin on contemporary Britain by analyzing the work of representativeblack authors and artists. Their narratives, paintings, poems, songs,performances have for us an aesthetic value as ‘art’, but also anepistemological value, because their imaginative effort produces knowledgeas a result of a confrontation with power and an entanglement withpower — with Englishness, the tradition, the canon, the mainstream.

In one of his incisive statements about Englishness Stuart Hallobserves that,

huge ideological work has to go on every day to produce this mouse thatpeople can recognize as the English. You have to look at everything in orderto produce it. You have to look at the curriculum, at the Englishness ofEnglish art. At what is truly English poetry, and you have to rescue thatfrom all the other things that are not English. Everywhere, the question ofEnglishness is in contention.

As one of the most influential practitioners of black cultural studiesin Britain, Hall has followed closely the transformation of Englishnational identity, which began after WWII and became visible inthe late s, particularly during Thatcher’s government. Thecontemporary production of Englishness became then, and continuesto be, a labour–intensive occupation, because England has lost thematerial foundation of that identity: an overseas empire, economicprosperity, and global political prestige. To add to England’s troubles,the old empire has been replaced by the “empire within,” generatedby the flows of black migration to the British mainland that started inthe s and have become increasingly unwelcome to a number ofBritons.

. The word “entanglement” commonly translates Édouard Glissant’s point d’intrication,which is the moment of encounter between power and its other, and between cultures.Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, , p..

. S. Hall, “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” in A. McClintock,A. Mufti and E. Shohat (eds), Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives,Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, , p. .

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This account of post–imperial Englishness has turned out to behegemonic in contemporary British cultural studies, and we want tosimply endorse it here, because what we are interested in is not somuch how or why the English lost their supposedly homogeneousand exclusively white Englishness. Instead, we want to focus on theequally labour–intensive occupation of all those who are striving togive Great Britain its contemporary face(s), through a number ofaesthetic and cultural acts of representation.

To describe these acts, and their possible effects, I would like togo back for a moment to the early s and to the uncomfortableposition of a writer who is neither black nor a marginal subject, butwhose work has been central to inscribing “a migrant’s–eye viewof the world” on to the British landscape. I am referring to SalmanRushdie, whose novels have variously captured, as he himself says,

the transformation that comes of the new and unexpected combinations ofhuman beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. . . Mélange, hotchpotch,a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the greatpossibility that mass migration gives the world, and I have tried to embraceit. [My work] is for change–by–fusion, change–by–conjoining. It is a love–song to our mongrel selves . . . Like many millions of people, I am a bastardchild of history. Perhaps we all are, black and brown and white, leaking intoone another . . . like flavours when you cook.

I feel it is the “possibilities” of this leaking that we are exploring inthis volume, both at the theoretical level and at the level of aestheticpractice.

What Rushdie implies in his essay is not an act of postmodernliberation from boundaries and rooted identities that was fashionableat the time (the late s). He is not celebrating any form of mixtureor postmodern pastiche, but offering a strategic response to a situationof domination and conflict, and of power inequality. His gesturetowards “our mongrel selves” is relevant to our discussion because itstems from an understanding that the act of becoming “mongrels,”“bastards,” or “mixed,” now necessarily involves everyone, and is

. S. Rushdie, “In Good Faith” () in Imaginary Homelands. Essays and Criticism–, London: Granta Books, p. .

Introduction

motivated by historical processes that are irreversible and could/shouldlead to a more democratic world.

I will emphasize, along with a number of postcolonial critics, thatthe strength of this view arises from its historical specificity, from itsbeing located in the history of colonization, slavery, forced migration,and most recently, in the global circulation of labour; and that, withinthis historical process, “fusion” has always occurred in circumstancesof massive disparities of power between the cultures involved.

The black arts under discussion force us to engage with these issuesin ways that take us outside of our common–sense view of reality andits representations, while also making clear that the processes andpractices of artistic production stem from their existence in a worldmarked by dissymmetry.

Whether strategies of resistance, of inventiveness, of creativity inthe arts can show us new ways of being in the world with others, ornew visions of inclusive citizenship or conviviality, is a moot point,particularly in the current historical moment when, to address thehuge questions of immigration and globalization that confront not justBritain but the whole European Union today, we invoke “security”and put up increasingly higher walls. The first decade of the newmillennium has marked a new complex turn, whose political andcultural outcomes are not yet clear. But the contributions in thisvolume do offer a vision of the transformations that can result fromthe relational, intersectional, or multidirectional approaches that havebeen used productively by Black British writers and artists.

As for the right words to say all this, as critics, or to represent achanging world, we need to keep searching. Martin Heidegger, atthe end of the second of his famous seminars on identity anddifference, encouraged his audience not to dwell on the difficultiesof finding an exact language for the expression of thought, but todevote their efforts to a deeper reflection on what was said. Because,he added, “this was said in a seminar. As the word itself indicates,a “seminar” is a place and an opportunity to sow a seed, a grain of

. S. Hall, “Créolité and the Power of Creolization,” in O. Enwezor et al. (eds) Créolitéand Creolization, Documenta, Platform, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, , p. .

Annalisa Oboe

thought that sooner or later, this time or another time, in its own way,will open up and be fruitful.”

This was exactly our aim when we first shared the ideas discussedin this volume in a seminar at the University of Padua in January .

What follows is, hopefully, an opening seed.

. M. Heidegger, Identità e differenza, Milano: Adelphi, , p. (my translation).. Our thanks go to all the friends and colleagues of AISCLI (Associazione Italiana

di Studi sulle Culture e Letterature di Lingua Inglese) who took part in the seminar andactively contributed to our debate.

Black Arts in BritainISBN 978–88–548–4424–7DOI 10.4399/97888548442472pag. 13–32 (dicembre 2011)

The Location of Blacknessin rd Millennium Britain

F G

The British social and cultural arena has changed over the courseof the twentieth century to accommodate sites of racial and vitaldifference, from class and gender to sexuality and ethnicity, but do st

century British society and culture really acknowledge the pluralityand heterogeneity of Britishness in equal measure? Do they offeradequate space of visibility, expression and self–representation toeverybody, regardless of class, race and gender? This contributionaims to investigate the location of blackness in the first decade of rd

millennium Britain, questioning the role and place of black artisticproduction within the national cultural arena and public debate,through fiction, theatre and film. Rather than offering answers, Iwould like to raise questions for further discussion. Where doesblack culture locate itself at the beginning of the new century, if itis able to do so freely? Or where does mainstream culture relegateit to? Are black arts and culture still politically overdetermined asa site of ideological struggle, and, if so, which are the key culturalsites for black self–representation in contemporary Britain? Are themulticultural or transcultural labels practical or suitable enough toequally fit in the mainstream and its fringes? By suggesting the needfor a new ethnicity of Britishness, which disrupts the immutabilityof the myth of a pure white Anglo–Saxon Englishness — which hasmade an alarming comeback in the new century as a consequence ofa new wave of chauvinistic, patriotic feelings — I want to reflect on astatement made by Dimple Godiwala: “In a country such as Britainwhich is riven by the hierarchy of class, race then represents anotherkind of barrier. The institutionalization of racism allows for tokenism,

Francesca Giommi

by which a certain kind of liberal from the dominant classes canreassure himself of his multicultural inclusiveness whilst continuing toexclude his racial/economic others in very large part” (Godiwala :). Looking at the position occupied by Black British artists and theirwork in the first decade of the third millennium, I want to questionhere the notions of centre and marginality as posed by Stuart Hall, ofHomi Bhabha’s third space and Paul Gilroy’s conviviality, to discusstheir usefulness and applicability to the social and political sphere andthe effective possibility of any form of civic nationalism.

Black artists in Britain still experience tagging most of the time,as demonstrated by the persistent need for a separate space forexhibition and recognition partly due to neglect by the mainstream,and the constant search for new labels and definitions, which placesuch artistic productions in precise and still separate niches. Despitethe current visibility and apparent centrality of a selected group ofnames and the undeniable aesthetic value and the rich variety ofwork, black artists are rarely nominated for mainstream awards andwhen they are, it is normally an unexpected event, discussed andjudged more in relation to their skin colour and ethnic belongingthan to their art. In December , for the first time in Britisheducational history, an official body as influential as theQualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) expressly statedthe need for recognition of the black presence in Britain, which,they argued, is still neglected and underestimated, considered asoccasional, accidental and transitory, associated for the most partwith specific events and celebrations, such as the fiftieth anniversaryof the arrival of the Empire Windrush in or the bicentenary ofthe abolition of slavery in .

My reflections begin with my personal experience of two keyevents on the Black British cultural calendar of , the Notting HillCarnival in August and London Black History Month in October.While taking for granted the indisputable historical role, aestheticvalue and celebration–worthy achievements of such occasions —which many have recognized — I want here to problematize theseevents and share some personal observations and doubts, in order topossibly push the debate forward.

The Location of Blackness in rd Millennium Britain

Over the past four decades the Notting Hill Carnival has becomethe biggest street event in Europe, attracting tourists and participantsfrom all around the world to London in the last weekend of August.It has been said that the edition had two million visitorsand was one of the most successful and memorable carnivals ever.However I must confess my own partial disappointment with itand my suspicion that the event has been commoditised and haspartly lost its original subversive purpose and potential. With anacademically–oriented approach, I attended the parade searching forcarnivalizing techniques, waiting for Anansi and its narratives, but Iwas in fact disappointed at not being able to clearly recognize thedenotative value of given signs. I thus wondered to what extent thisgroundbreaking cultural event is still governed by the Bakhtiniandialogic principle of the mobility of the carnivalesque aestheticand of how capable it is of triggering a process of social change.Originally, carnival eliminated the barriers between active performerand passive audience, creating a plural critical dialogism, able tooverturn the binary relations of hegemonic boundary maintenanceby multiplying dialogues within particular communities and betweenthe various constituencies making up the “imagined community” ofthe nation. The London event’s performative and reflexive mode ofaddress, aimed at enlisting the participation of the spectator, seemedhowever diluted among the multitude of confusing voices, coloursand fragmented components, and I did not always feel I was sharingactive responsibility for making semantic connections between themulti–accentual elements of the image flow.

Black History Month is an event taking place every Octoberthroughout the United Kingdom to celebrate and recognize theAfrican and Caribbean contribution to British society and culture. Themain aims of the Month are to disseminate information on positiveblack contributions to British society, to heighten the confidence andawareness of black people in their cultural heritage, and to promoteknowledge of black history and experiences. As well as a platform forblack culture, it is part of an ongoing educational project to redressperceived distortions and omissions of Africa’s global contributionto world civilization. The event’s chosen symbol is the Sankofa bird,

Francesca Giommi

Figure . Notting Hill Carnival © Francesca Giommi.

an Akan symbol showing a bird looking backwards while movingforwards, signifying an archaeological approach to black artisticinquiry and the need to learn from the past in order to understandbetter the present and its future possibilities. Inaugurated in Londonin during African Jubilee Year, BHM has expanded over theyears, and what was once unique to London is now nationwide. Itsparticipants now encompass voluntary organizations, local authorities,museums, and the media. Events range from theatrical productions tostorytelling, exhibitions, musical performances, poetry readings, andcomedy shows. In recent years the scope of the Month has expandedso that it now recognizes the general contribution of cultural diversityto British society, and local authorities have been proactive in hostingand organizing events. While taking part in some of the events duringthe edition, however, I could not help wondering who their real

The Location of Blackness in rd Millennium Britain

target is today and what the scale and impact of such initiatives are fora non–specialist, non–informed audience.

I could cite just a couple of examples to support my argumentsand explain my concerns. The Bernie Grant Arts Centre in SevenSisters — recently inaugurated as a cutting–edge centre for culturaldiversity — displayed for the occasion two painting exhibitions byblack artists Tony Nero and Helen Wilson, but the mass of people Imet at the tube station was in fact leaving after a Tottenham footballmatch, while the Arts Centre was totally deserted, despite it being aSaturday afternoon. The Black History walks led by historian SteveMartin following the traces left by the black presence in the metropoliswere extremely interesting, but drew in small numbers of participants,except for school pupils in black neighbourhoods such as Blackheathor New Cross, as if only black people might or should be interestedin rediscovering “their own” history and culture. A larger audiencegathered at Southbank Centre at the end of the month to celebrate theth anniversary of the Wasafiri journal, attracted by big names suchas Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Indian Anita Desai, BritishAminatta Forna and Bernardine Evaristo, and British expatriate livingin the US Fred D’Aguiar, once again bringing up issues of ethnicidentification and concomitant artistic overdetermination. One of themost frequently raised and still hotly debated questions is: shouldthese artists at the end of the first decade of the third millennium stillcelebrate their achievements at separate anniversaries and lead theirwork down monocultural, race–specific routes?

At the beginning of the new century many writers and criticsalike started asking if we should still be focusing on “black writingin Britain” or if we should instead be going beyond these tired olddebates. The naming of oneself “to be or not to be Black British”appears, in fact, only to be possible from the safe embrace of themainstream and the academy. Most Black British artists argue thatonly when black writers are on equal footing in publishing andperformance opportunities with non–black writers will it be possible

. Some of the contributions to the event have been published in Wasafiri , Autumn.

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to accept the title British writing tout court. The usefulness andnecessity to maintain a distinction in such a transitory historical andcultural moment as the turn of the century is stressed by DimpleGodiwala in his introduction to Alternatives Within the Mainstream,when he says:

an attitude towards inclusion is always laudable. However, locating thehistories of subject–agents who belonged to previous colonized territorieswithin the logic of Western trajectories, defines Black by what it is not, bywhat it does not resemble. Black and Asian identity in Britain therefore, isgenerally perceived as being located in a difference from, and not withinthe constructed ethnic identity (Englishness) of the mainstream. The lattermay be defined as contemporary White writing which seldom representsthe racial Other. It is only by locating themselves in an identity space whichreflects the material of their histories, the forms of their own performance,their values and ideologies, their social practices, can dramatists of colourbegin to write their identities and experience as subjects–in–the–world.

(Godiwala : )

Generally, though, the hope of overcoming all kinds of barriers andseparatism and seeing a time when art will be considered and classifiedaccording to superior principles is rooted and widespread. As early as, Yvonne Brewster, the co–founder of Talawa Theatre Company,revealed her determination for inclusion into the British theatrescape:“My ultimate aim is never to have to say ‘black theatre’ again. It wouldmean that I have come full circle, as I never had occasion to use theterm when I started out in Jamaica” (Brewster in Godiwala : ).

Fiction

At the turn of the century, Britain had already lost some of its bestknown and acclaimed black voices to the United States, such asexpatriate writers Caryl Phillips and Fred D’Aguiar, as a result of theinability to find their own space in a country still riven by postcolonialand postimperial hierarchies of race. In the meantime anunprecedented explosion of what is called the multicultural novel

The Location of Blackness in rd Millennium Britain

occurred in the UK, invading bookshop windows, newspaper pagesand television screens. Mass–media phenomena such as White Teeth(), Brick Lane () and Small Island (), monopolized thescene and apparently dominated national cultural debates onmulticulturalism and transculturality. These texts testify to the viabilityof fictional reflections on multi–ethnic Britain after the year ;however the current popularity of these writers seems to be tied inwith the Western liberal middle–class taste for the exotic, postmodernmix of cultural difference and multiple identifications within a confinedand fixed pattern of representation, thus obscuring a wider and morevaried production. From a recent conversation I had in London withwriter Bernardine Evaristo, it emerged that mixed–race writers aremost often at the forefront of the multicultural debate, as if havinga partially white ancestry gave them preferential access to themainstream.

Multicultural optimism has been totally abandoned by dystopianrenditions of post–/ and / London in fiction and film (see PatrickNeate: City of Tiny Lights, ; Rupert Thomson: Divided Kingdom,; Michael Winterbottom: In this World, , and Code , ).Multicultural or transcultural rhetoric has become more and moreutopian in the past decade and increasingly detached from politicaland social praxis, while the politics of religious, ethnic and nationalaffiliation have been brought to the forefront of popular debates again,in order to support a “just war” on terrorism and severe legislationconcerning issues of immigration and interculturality.

Particularly relevant to the third millennium British literary sceneis the work of a number of women of Nigerian origin, especiallyLondoners, who are carving new transnational narratives, identitiesand spaces of belonging within the national physical and literarylandscape. The already acclaimed and recognized work by Nigerian–Scottish Jackie Kay and Nigerian–Londoner Bernardine Evaristo hasopened up a whole series of expressive possibilities for a youngergeneration of storytellers, ranging from Helen Oyeyemi to DianaEvans. Their fresh look at contemporary London and Britain presentsa fully renovated country where a young woman of Nigerian ancestrycan rightfully reclaim a space of proper belonging and unbounded

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artistic expression, playing out a subversion of categorising andessentialising notions of culture, and debunking false myths ofauthenticity. Their hybrid, in–between location allows them thefreedom to desert, at a certain point of their artistic career, the pathof racial connotation to engage in new challenges and unexploredterrains, such as fantasy and vampire teens–fiction for instance, withall the risks this choice implies. Belonging to an even youngergeneration of Nigerian–Londoners is Lizzy Dijeh, one of Britain’smost talented and promising young black playwrights. Despite hertender age, she was able to gain public and critical attention thanks inparticular to her fifth play, High Life, which investigates the disparitiesthat exist between cultures and the conflicts and tensions arising inmulticultural/migrant families, through a lively dialogue capturingthe cadences and syntax of Nigerians speaking English.

Genre experimentation and technical hybridity are commonfeatures in contemporary black artistic production in Britain. BlackBritish writers currently operating in the UK demonstrate an abilityto move between several genres, from prose to verse, from dramato film with extraordinary ease and confidence. They also attemptto disengage their art from the confinements of racial representation,from any kind of label and expectation from the audience, as isthe case of Nigerian–born, London–based novelist, playwright andfilm–director Biyi Bandele, to name just one of the most significantexamples. Refusing all restrictive labels, and the burden ofrepresentation they imply, Bandele advocates total freedom ofexpression and defines himself a sui generis artist, continuously crossingand re–crossing borders, genres, languages and cultures. When asked,he indicates as his artistic models and literary forefathers Wole Soyinkaand Chinua Achebe on the one hand, and John Osborne, SamuelBeckett and Brian Friel on the other, thus making of his work asignificant example of postcolonial and postmodern syncretic writing,responding to the centre and its canon, but decentring them in asubversive and powerful way. In his stage adaptation of ChinuaAchebe’s Things Fall Apart ( []) Bandele demonstrated ayouthful yet mature and fully developed capability of giving new life towhat had already become in the previous fifty years a masterpiece of