A Brief Overview
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
The first black person to appear in written British records was a Roman centurion put under guard for disobeying an order. So the story goes, and whether this is true or false, apocryphal or factual, there have been blacks living in Britain in established communities for many centuries. The unfulfilled wish of Britain's first Queen Elizabeth to rid her imperial self of these ‘blackamores’ is testimony. According to a recent UK census by the year 2011 twenty-eight per cent of Londoners will be of either Black or Asian descent, forty six per cent of whom will have been born in the UK.
This short article concentrates on just one strand of the manifold cultural inroads which support the blossoming reality of a Britain where many cultures co-exist and sometimes thrive. It will take a look at two decades of development in the history of Black Theatre in Britain: the 1970s where it will focus on the playwrights and the productions, and the 1980s (when there was a unique flowering of Black theatre companies in England) where it will attempt to pull together representative high points of the activity and imagination in Black British Theatre companies experienced then.
There have been as many words used to describe African and African-Caribbean members of the population as there have been centuries of their presence in the United Kingdom, including ‘immigrant’, ‘coloured’, ‘darkie’ and ‘ethnic minority’ and so on.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.