The Afterlives of Enslavement: Histories of Racial Injustice in Contemporary Black British Theatre

Abstract

Over the past five years, a number of Black British women authors have written what might be called postcolonial ghost plays. This article focuses, to varying degrees, on four: ear for eye (2018), debbie tucker green’s dissection of enslavement and its afterlives; Rockets and Blue Lights (2020), Winsome Pinnock’s historical film-within-a-play about the Middle Passage; The Gift (2020), Janice Okoh’s semi-biography of an African girl who became Queen Victoria’s ward; and Selina Thompson’s salt. (2018), an autobiographical performance piece tracing her ancestors’ enslavement. Ghosts and haunting, which I examine from multiple perspectives, appear across this range of theatrical genres. With their multiple, doubled, spectral, interpenetrating stories, tucker green, Pinnock, Okoh, and Thompson’s postcolonial ghost plays reactivate the past of enslavement that has not passed, that is still active in the form of racial and social injustices today. Ghosts, prevalent across the plays, represent the dead who, plumbing the depths of the Middle Passage, are denied a resting place. The ghost, the figure of the living dead par excellence, reflects the dehumanization of trafficked Africans, from whom their enslavers sought to subtract all subjectivity. Ghosts, too, reveal the work of mourning performed by the living for those who were never properly buried. This mourning exposes and disrupts enduring structures of injustice, and searches for reparation. Ghosts, or revenants, returning and refusing to rest, represent the resilient resistance to injustice. Finally, ghosts, neither fully past nor present, absent or present, symbolize indeterminacy and instability, illustrated in the plays by subjects determined to take control of their own identities and destinies. Together, these plays demonstrate how we must look back to the roots of historical racism in order to look forward to its eradication.