Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics, Performance (review)

Lynette Goddard's book is a welcome addition to a growing body of scholarly work on black and Asian theatre in Britain. It is the second monograph on the subject to have been published in recent years, the first being Gabriele Griffin's 2003 survey, Contemporary Black and Asian Women Playwrights in Britain (Cambridge UP). Staging Black Feminisms is similarly focused upon the work of women playwrights, and Goddard, like Griffin, covers an impressive range of materials, including unpublished plays and fringe performances. Goddard is more specifically concerned with black playwrights since the 1980s, particularly those of African-Caribbean descent. She is also more polemical in her approach. At the outset, she offers a set of guidelines for studying the work of black women playwrights. Observing that "black women's very presence in the British theatre industry is seen to constitute some sort of feminist intervention" (3), Goddard emphasizes that not all black women are feminist and argues that more specific analytical criteria must be applied to distinguish actively interventionist plays from those "that are not necessarily speaking to feminist agendas" (4). Goddard also points out that plenty of "stereotypical and simplistic representations" find their way into plays by black women, in part because of the "predominant expectations" of "the white-led theatre industry" and its audiences (10) and in part because of the "bourgeois feminist" sensibilities of some black women playwrights themselves (32).

The task of the feminist scholar, then, should be to interrogate more fully and critically the scope and nature of feminist concerns in black women's performance. Rather than dwelling on insufficiently feminist work, however, Goddard privileges writers and performers she feels have significantly challenged standard perceptions and depictions of black women: those who have deconstructed "prevailing ideas about gender, race and sexuality, offering alternatives to the so-called 'norms,"' and who have "aid[ed] substantially in the production of new meanings" (54). Goddard is particularly concerned about the pervasive exclusion of lesbian characters and experience, which she argues has reified "heterosexuality as the dominant and authentic mode of black womanhood" (6): "[T]he epitome of the challenge to create innovative and progressive black performances involves a more substantial objection to the fundamental, deepest inset and most pervasive of institutional values – heterosexuality – which will lead to the production of a wider range of black female subjectivities as viable positions" (7). Accordingly, works about lesbians, such as Jacqueline Rudet's Basin (1985), Adeola Agbebiyi's Four Women (1996), and the work of lesbian writers such as Jackie Kay and Valerie Mason-John, receive particular attention. (Ironically, however, the back cover does not include lesbianism in its list of the book's key themes.)

Goddard aligns herself with feminist critiques of realism, such as those of Sue-Ellen Case and Jeanie Forte, arguing in the chapter "Black Feminist Performance Aesthetics" that "[p]lays presented with an awareness of content and form" (in which category she includes non-naturalistic performance as well as live arts and performance poetry) "seem to hold the greatest possibilities for conceiving black women differently" (53). At the same time, Goddard's discussions of the plays indicate some flexibility and nuance in her approach to realism; her perceptive reading of Rudet's Basin, for example, outlines the ways in which the play defies heteronormative assumptions while apparently working within the realist confines of the love story. Goddard's criticism of Winsome Pinnock's work is also thought provoking. While she argues that Pinnock's work is less conventionally realist than it initially seems, she contends that Pinnock relies on "stock character types" and that her work is tailored "to fit mainstream perspectives" (80–81). Indeed, Goddard's study suggests that real feminist interventions are difficult to achieve under the aegis of the subsidized theatres, where, usually, radical views and formal innovation are sacrificed in the interests of appealing to the "mainstream." Writing of "performance art, dance and poetry" in the penultimate chapter, she provocatively concludes that "working outside the confines...