Abstract
As the New Labour government began its office, with its multiculturalist emphasis on diversity and tolerance, the Minister in charge of the new Department of Culture, Media and Sport, Chris Smith claimed that some cultures had become so ‘absorbed’ that ‘we’ no longer thought of ‘them’ as ‘foreign’. A South African sitar, according to Smith, was ‘music, not foreign music’.1 Smith’s claims call to mind the aspiration to ‘legitimate diversity’ (my emphasis) of New Labour ideologue Anthony Giddens, and the grooming of identity according to a contract of empa-thy.2 Kwame Kwei-Armah himself in fact graciously described his presence in the mainstream as a symptom of liberalism, explicitly aligning himself with the ‘new wave of empathy’ that seemed to coincide with the Party’s accession.3 Given the history of black voices and speech in Britain since the waves of immigration following the Second World War, for Kwei-Armah, Roy Williams and debbie tucker green — black playwrights who emerged during New Labour’s empathetic regime — the sounds and styles of the voices they constructed would inevitably raise problematic issues of inclusion, assimilation and representation.
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Notes
Chris Smith, Creative Britain (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), p. 36.
Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Cambridge: Polity, 1992), p. 132.
In 1972, HMSO reported that the practices of schools to insist that black children reject the values of their parents was crueller than those imposed on the white working class. The 1986 Eggleston report emphasised how schools had expected black immigrants to leave behind their dialects, values and home lives. The Institute of Race Relations report, Outcast England (1994), concluded that the high exclusion rates of black children was caused not only by black children’s extreme reactions to racism, but also by a societal stereotype that associates ‘black’ with ‘problem’. A. H. Halsey, Educational Priority (HMSO, 1972), p. 3;
John Egglestone, Education for Some: The Educational and Vocational Experiences of 15–18 Year-old Members of Minority Ethnic Groups (Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham, 1986);
Jenny Bourne, Lee Bridges and Chris Searle, Outcast England: How Schools Exclude Black Children (Institute of Race Relations, 1994).
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Who Do We Think We Are: Imagining the New Britain (London: Penguin, 2001), pp. 160–2. Paul Gilroy also describes the assessment of black British identity by white society as deviant and criminal.
Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993).
Rachael Gilmour, ‘Doing Voices: Reading Language as Craft in Black British Poetry’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2014, https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/ jspui/handle/123456789/5859 [accessed 28 June 2014]. David Sutcliffe draws on research carried out in the 1970s to show how ‘patterns of Black British language choice run counter to the white pattern in the larger community’. David Sutcliffe, Black British English (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), p. 146.
Dabydeen, ‘On Not Being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today’, in The Routledge Language and Cultural Theory Reader, ed. Lucy Bourke, Tony Crowley and Alan Girvin (London and New York: Routledge, 2000) pp. 302–9 (p. 307).
Jatinder Verma, ‘The Challenge of Binglish: Analysing Multicultural Productions’, in Analysing Performance: A Critical Reader, edited by Patrick Campbell (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 193–201 (pp. 195–8).
See Alda Terracciano, ‘Mainstreaming African, Asian and Caribbean Culture: The Experiments of the Black Theatre Forum’, in Alternatives Within the Mainstream, pp. 22–50; and Winsome Pinnock, ‘Breaking Down the Door’, in Theatre in a Cool Climate, ed. by Vera Gottlieb and Colin Chambers (Oxford: Amber Lane Press, 1999), p. 31.
Mustapha Maturo, ‘Ter Speak in Yer Mudder Tongue’, Black British Culture and Society, edited by Michael McMillan (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 255–64 (p. 258).
Roy Williams, quoted in Aleks Sierz, ‘What Kind of England Do We Want?’, New Theatre Quarterly, 22 (2006), 113–21 (pp. 113–14); Kwame Kwei-Armah, ‘Sixty Years of Forgotten Treasures’, Guardian, 27 September 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/sep/27/black-theatre-archive-kwei-armah [accessed 29 May 2010].
The Landscape of Fact: Towards a Policy of Cultural Diversity for the English Funding System (1997) and Cultural Diversity Action Plan (1998). In 2006 the Sustained Theatre consultation produced a raft of initiatives, including Eclipse and the deciBel Awards, making available £250,000 in prize money to Black and Asian British Artists. Lola Young, Whose Theatre? Report on the Sustained Theatre Consultation (Arts Council England, 2006), http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/media/uploads/documents/publications/whosetheatre_phpB7dYie.pdf [accessed 20 March 2010].
Kwame Kwei-Armah, quoted in Deirdre Osborne, ‘“Know Whence You Came”: Dramatic Art and British Identity’, New Theatre Quarterly, 23 (2007), 253–63 (p. 259).
Kwame Kwei-Armah, Elmina’s Kitchen (London: Methuen, 2003), p. 4. Further references are given in the text.
See Stacey Duncan, ‘Language and Identity in Youth Culture’, in Contemporary Youth Culture: An International Encyclopedia, edited by Priya Parmar, Birgit Richard and Shirley Steinberg (West Port, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 2006), pp. 37–41 (p. 39).
Kwame Kwei-Armah, Fix Up (London: Methuen, 2004), p. 4. Further references are given in the text.
Kwame Kwei-Armah, Statement of Regret (London: Methuen, 2007), p. 2.
Roy Williams, Joe Guy (London: Methuen, 2007), p. 5.
Derek Walcott, A Branch of the Blue Nile in Three Plays (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1986), p. 218; Kwei-Armah, conference panel contribution, at ‘How Was it For Us? … ’.
See McEnery and Xiao on public perception of a correlation between swearing and class. Anthony McEnery and Zhonghua Xiao, ‘Swearing in Modern British English: the Case of Fuck in the BNC’, Language and Literature, 3 (2004), 235–68.
Roy Williams, ‘Sing Yer Heart Out For the Lads’, Plays 2 (London: Methuen, 2004), pp. 129–235 (p. 132). Further references will be given in the text.
Paul Bagguley and Yasmin Hussain ‘The Bradford Riot of 2001: A Preliminary Analysis’, conference paper at the Ninth Alternative Futures and Popular Protest Conference, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2003, http://www.leeds.ac.uk/sociology/people/pbdocs/Bradfordriot.doc [accessed 25 November 2006].
See Harry Derbyshire, ‘Roy Williams: Representing Multicultural Britain in Fallout’ Modern Drama, 50 (2007), 414–34 (p. 414).
Roy Williams, Fallout (London: Methuen, 2003), p. 8. Further references will appear in the text.
Helen Cadbury, ‘Sing Yer Heart out For the Lads’: Education Pack (Pilot Theatre, 2007), pp. 14–26.
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© 2015 Margaret Inchley
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Inchley, M. (2015). Vocalising Allegiance: Kwame Kwei-Armah, Roy Williams and debbie tucker green. In: Voice and New Writing, 1997–2007. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137432339_5
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