â oeBlackâ British Aesthetics Today is a collection of twenty-four exciting critical and theoretical essays exploring current thinking about the hottest artistic, literary, and critical works now being produced by â oeblackâ Britons. This book features a number of chapters by the avant-garde â oeblackâ British novelists, poets, and artists themselves. It includes, for instance, aesthetic manifestos by Diran Adebayo, Anthony Joseph, Roshini Kempadoo, Sheree Mack, Valerie Mason-John, and SuAndi as well as key essays by globally renowned critics, including Amna Malik, Kobena Mercer, Lauri Ramey, Roy Sommer, and many others. As a compendium, this book represents a powerfully fresh intellectual current of thought. It provides readers with important insights into contemporary â oeblackâ aesthetics, and it includes an array of important clarifications initially voiced at the groundbreaking international symposium that took place on April 8, 2006, at Howard University in Washington, D.C., by outstanding new scholars in this burgeoning field of study: e.g., Kevin Etienne-Cummings, Valerie Kaneko Lucas, Michael McMillan, Magdalena Maczynska, Courtney Martin, Jude Okpala, Deirdre Osborne, Koye Oyedeji, Meenakshi Ponnuswami, Sandra Ponzanesi, Andrene M. Taylor, Samera Owusu Tutu, and Tracey Walters. The authors contextualise contemporary â oeblackâ British aesthetics in relation to the African, African American, and Postcolonial aesthetic traditions; they explore an exciting array of critical theories, trends of feeling, and lively aesthetic movements thriving today in â oeblackâ Britain; and they examine and assess embodied aesthetics at play in a wide range of specific works by todayâ (TM)s most brilliant â oeblackâ British novelists, poets, photographers, live performance artists, dramatists, architects, musicians, graphic artists, and cinematographers.

This indispensable overview of modern black British drama spans seven decades of distinctive playwriting from the 1950s to the present. Interweaving social and cultural context with close critical analysis of key dramatists' plays, leading scholars explore how these dramatists have created an enduring, transformative and diverse cultural presence.

Black artists of African and Caribbean descent and major contributions to the British art scene Black artists have been making major contributions to the global art scene since at least the middle of the 20th century. While some of these artists of African and Caribbean descent have been embraced at times by the art world, they have mostly been neglected or have not received the recognition they deserve. Taking its starting point as the Windrush-era Caribbean Artists Movement, and considering and contextualizing the political, cultural, and artistic climate from which it emerged, this concise introduction showcases the work of 70 Black-British artists from the 1930s to the present. Artwork in a range of media offer a lens through which to understand some of the events and issues confronted and explored, shedding light on the Black-British experience. Constructed around contemporary ideas on race, national identity, citizenship, gender, sexuality, and aesthetics in Britain, this book interrogates themes at the heart of Black-British art, revealing art in dialogue with a complex past and present. Featuring some of the most prominent and influential Black-British artists of recent decades, as well as less well-known artists, it also includes work from a new generation of artists on the cutting edge of contemporary art. At a time when visibility within the art world has taken on a renewed urgency, this is a timely and accessible introduction celebrating Black-British artists and their outstanding contribution to art history.

Black is Beautiful identifies and explores the most significant philosophical issues that emerge from the aesthetic dimensions of black life, providing a long-overdue synthesis and the first extended philosophical treatment of this crucial subject. The first extended philosophical treatment of an important subject that has been almost entirely neglected by philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of art Takes an important step in assembling black aesthetics as an object of philosophical study Unites two areas of scholarship for the first time – philosophical aesthetics and black cultural theory, dissolving the dilemma of either studying philosophy, or studying black expressive culture Brings a wide range of fields into conversation with one another– from visual culture studies and art history to analytic philosophy to musicology – producing mutually illuminating approaches that challenge some of the basic suppositions of each Well-balanced, up-to-date, and beautifully written as well as inventive and insightful Winner of The American Society of Aesthetics Outstanding Monograph Prize 2017

This book examines the socio-political and theatrical conditions that heralded the shift from the margins to the mainstream for black British Writers, through analysis of the social issues portrayed in plays by Kwame Kwei-Armah, debbie tucker green, Roy Williams, and Bola Agbaje.

During the era of the slave trade, more than 12 million Africans were brought as slaves to the Americas. Their memories, ideas, beliefs, and practices would forever reshape its history and cultures. April C. E. Langley's The Black Aesthetic Unbound exposes the dilemma of the literal, metaphorical, and rhetorical question, "What is African in African American literature?" Confronting the undeniable imprints of West African culture and consciousness in early black writing such as Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative or Phillis Wheatley's poetry, the author conceives eighteenth-century Black Experience to be literally and figuratively encompassing and inextricably linked to Africa, Europe, and America. Consequently, this book has three aims: to locate the eighteenth century as the genesis of the cultural and historical movements which mark twentieth-century black aestheticism--known as the Black Aesthetic; to analyze problematic associations of African identity as manifested in an essentialized Afro-America; and to study the relationship between specific West African modes of thought and expression and the emergence of a black aesthetic in eighteenth-century North America. By exploring how Senegalese, Igbo, and other West African traditions provide striking new lenses for reading poetry and prose by six significant writers, Langley offers a fresh perspective on this important era in our literary history. Ultimately, the author confronts the difficult dilemma of how to use diasporic, syncretic, and vernacular theories of Black culture to think through the massive cultural transformations wrought by the Middle Passage.

Black British Drama: A Transnational Story looks afresh at the ways black theatre in Britain is connected to and informed by the spaces of Africa, the Caribbean and the USA. Michael Pearce offers an exciting new approach to reading modern and contemporary black British drama, examining plays by a range of writers including Michael Abbensetts, Mustapha Matura, Caryl Phillips, Winsome Pinnock, Kwame Kwei-Armah, debbie tucker green, Roy Williams and Bola Agbaje. Chapters combine historical documentation and discussion with close analysis to provide an in-depth, absorbing account of post-war black British drama situated within global and transnational circuits. A significant contribution to black British and black diaspora theatre studies, Black British Drama is a must-read for scholars and students in this evolving field.

Includes the plays A Bitter Herb, Absolution, Identity, The Far Side, Mary Seacole, and Urban Afro-Saxons This second and sister volume to Hidden Gems showcases a further range of plays by Black British writers whose work reaches beyond themes too-often perceived by mainstream theatre commissioning as defining Black people's experiences. The plays, monodrama and libretto represent subject-matter from woman-centred history, revolutionary politics, trans-racial adoption and African-diasporic familial heritage, as contoured by the writers' boundary crossing profiles as poets, playwrights, performers and directors. The accompanying critical introductions are provided by people committed to recognising the aesthetic and political significance of the work, and its necessary inclusion in British theatre and literary history.

This book marks a significant methodological shift in studies of black British women’s theatre: it looks beyond published plays to the wealth of material held in archives of various kinds, from national repositories and themed collections to individuals’ personal papers. It finds there a cache of unpublished manuscripts and production recordings distinctive for their non-naturalistic aesthetics. Close analysis of selected works identifies this as an intersectional feminist creative practice. Chapters focus on five theatre companies and artists, spanning several decades: Theatre of Black Women (1982-1988), co-founded by Booker Prize-winning writer Bernardine Evaristo; Munirah Theatre Company (1983-1991); Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop (1990-1992); Zindika; and SuAndi. The book concludes by reflecting on the politics of representation, with reference to popular postmillennial playwright debbie tucker green. Drawing on new interviews with the playwrights/practitioners and their peers, this book assembles a rich, interconnected, and occasionally corrective history of black British women’s creativity. By reproducing 22 facsimile images of flyers, production programmes, photographs and other ephemera, Black British Women’s Theatre: Intersectionality, Archives, Aesthetics not only articulates a hidden history but allows its readers their own encounter with the fragile record of this vibrant past.

This book provides a critical assessment of dramatic literature since 1995, situating texts, companies and writers in a cultural, political and social context. It examines the shifting role of the playwright, the dominant genres and emerging styles of the past decade and how they are related.Beginning with an examination of how dramatic literature and the writer are placed in the contemporary theatre, the book then provides detailed analyses of the texts, companies and writing processes involved in six different professional contexts: new writing, verbatim theatre, writing and devising, Black and Asian theatre, writing for young people and adaptation and transposition. The chapters cover contemporary practitioners, including Simon Stephens, Gregory Burke, Robin Soans, Alecky Blythe, Kneehigh Theatre, Punchdrunk, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Edward Bond, Filter Theatre and Headlong, and offers detailed case-studies and examples of their work.