Awards

• Short-listed for Raymond Williams Publishing Prize 1994

Overview

A landmark collection of plays for stage, screen and radio. While other anthologies of plays by writers of African descent have been published, Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers (1st edition 1993; new revised edition 2005) was the first drama anthology to represent women alone. Comedy, poetry, history and magic combined with themes of a social and spiritual nature are the themes and styles evident in Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers, a seminal collection of plays for stage, radio and television by Rukhsana Ahmad, Maya Chowdhry, Trish Cooke, Winsome Pinnock, Meera Syal and Zindika. Edited and introduced by Kadija George, Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers includes: Essays on theatre and writing workshop; The Importance of Oral Tradition to Black Theatre by Valerie Small; A survey, A Recent Look at Black Women Playwrights by Deirdre Osborne. This anthology's key characteristics are effortless depictions of characters devoid of stereotypical images and typecast roles and the playwrights' approach to unconventional issues. Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers represents just some of the writers who have achieved national recognition with work produced on stage, television and radio by some of the most distinguished actors, directors and producers of African and Asian descent that the arts field in Britain has seen. The anthology heralds the significance that young women of African and Asian descent now have more role models to look towards, reinforced by actors and writers-in-residence going into educational institutions and more diverse organisations and situations, from the BBC-supported writer-in-residence projects, with the likes of performer/artists Rommi Smith and Erika Tan, to performance poet/multi-media artist Dorothea Smartt as the Brixton Market Poet-in-Residence. Since the first publication of Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers: Meera Syal has become an international name, with novel, TV and stage credits including the popular musical, Bombay Dreams, debuting in the West End; After receiving a writer-in-residence fellowship at Cambridge University, Winsome Pinnock has gone on to produce further plays staged at much-respected fringe theatres such as the Tricycle Theatre; Maya Chowdhry continues to be experimental with her work in multimedia formats, has co-edited a book with Nina Rapi, Acts of Passion: Sexuality, Gender and Performance and is currently working on a coedited anthology of women's writing in the north of England, 'Bitch Lit'; Zindika has written for dance theatre, for Adzido, and co-edited a book, When Will I See You Again with Natalie Smith; Rukshana Ahmad has published a novel, The Hope Chest, and received a Royal Literary Fellowship; Trish Cooke has a successful career writing books for children. Yet moving from the margins and into the mainstream continues to happen too slowly. More than ten years since the first publication of this anthology, the fight and funding for a 'Black'-owned and -managed theatre in Britain is still being argued for, and unfortunately, has barely moved.

Full Product Details

9780951587720

Table of Contents

Reviews

'showcases a wealth of talent amongst Black and Asian communities... often neglected by mainstream publishers.'BLACK PRIDE MAGAZINE

The essence of theatre, according to Stuart Griffiths, lies not in the word so much as its ability to affect us, touch us so that we feel pleasure or pain, force us to identify with it by reflecting something which has significance to our life... Black theatre in Britain is surviving. Though few plays have made it to West End stages, productions on the fringe have had continuing success. These plays attract a predominantly Black audience and contain all the elements of the greatest drama: symbolism, language, conflict, rhythm. This is popular theatre at its best using every means necessary to awaken residues of oral traditions buried in the depths of the race memory. Valerie Small, The Importance Of Oral Tradition To Black Theatre (1993) The new writing initiatives of the late 20th century grew out of a need to haul white elitist (male-dominated) theatre into a multi-cultural world wherein the plays staged were more accurately reflective of surrounding society, demographically and culturally... After the funding decimation of many Black and Asian theatre groups in the late 1980s, the cultivation of writers from marginalised social groups comprised an aspect of dismantling institutional racism... As May Joseph has pointed out, it was not until the late 20th century that `the absence of Black women as subjects with agency' was challenged and countered by the work of black women playwrights. The importance of including and perpetuating indigenous Black British drama in the mainstream theatrescape can be neither underestimated nor over-emphasised. It provides a key cultural site wherein ethnicities and experiences who may not otherwise meet are directly exposed to each other's cultural practices... Black drama exposes mainstream (predominantly white) theatre-goers to aspects of Black British cultural input that is as indigenous to contemporary British cultural identity as that provided by white playwrights. It provides Black audiences with authentically rendered cultural representations which have not as yet been able to develop a flourishing continuum in Britain's cultural psyche. Deirdre Osborne, A Recent Look At Black Women Playwrights (2005)

Author Information

About the editor Kadija George is a literary activist, editor and publisher. Of Sierra Leonean descent, she read West African studies at Birmingham University, then became a freelance journalist, specialising in black arts, black British Literature and women's issues. In the mid-1990s, she worked for the Centreprise Literature Development Project as the Black Literature Development Coordinator and set up the newspaper, Calabash. She left there in 1998. In 2001, she became founder and managing editor of Sable magazine. Kadija has edited anthologies of black writing, including Burning Words, Flaming Images (1996) - poems and stories from writers of African descent; IC3: the Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain (2000), co-edited with Courttia Newland; and Write Black, Write British (2005). She is also the series editor for Inscribe, an imprint of Peepal Tree Press. Her first full collection of poems, Irki, was published in 2013. She has worked on projects with adults and young people, including one for the Commission for Racial Equality, and has been Writer in Residence for Vision Quest in Atlanta, US. She organises The Sable Writers' Hot Spot - trips for writers abroad and established Sable LitFest in 2005. She teaches creative writing and journalism. Her own writing appears in various anthologies and has been broadcast on radio and performed at a number of venues. She is a George Bell Fellow, Kennedy Center for Arts Management Fellow, and General Secretary of African Writers Abroad. She has won various awards for her work, including Cosmopolitan Woman of Achievement (1994), and Woman of the Millennium (2000). Kadija George lives between the UK and the USA. Performance Rights Information A HERO'S WELCOME: The Agency Ltd MY SISTER-WIFE: Rochelle Stevens and Co RUNNING DREAM: Curtis Brown Ltd. MONSOON/SONG FOR A SANCTUARY/LEONORA'S DANCE: Write to the Author (c) c/o Aurora Metro Books

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