Multiculturalism has not permeated the British theatre complex to the same degree that it has informed subject matter in poetry and prose writing – despite the fact that the live body on stage is a personal and potent reminder of social presence. When social diversity does not translate into socially proportionate theatre-going demographics, this reveals much about the theatre complex itself. Three elements inspired, established and shaped what, during the 1980s, came to be broadly defined as post-war ‘Black British Theatre’: the Caribbean diaspora, race and class. In part through their drama, this Caribbean-heritage community began, from the 1970s, to contribute to a change in conceptualising what it means to be British, where ‘black British dramatists’ refers primarily to those whose families originated in the Caribbean but, increasingly since the 1990s, from Africa.

However, this has not been a straightforward process, as even the term Black British Theatre has been contested by black dramatists and practitioners. In 2009, the playwright Roy Williams argued that British theatre continues to be controlled by white people and that non-whites are marginalized. He wished to assert difference: ‘Personally I love the phrase “black theatre”, and I think we need it to ensure we are heard. Theatre sounds po-faced and white; “black theatre” sounds intriguing, daring.’ Whereas Dawn Walton, artistic director of the Eclipse Theatre Company (which aims to combat institutional racism throughout the theatre and produce work by black dramatists), argues, ‘to suggest that black theatre has to have an all-black – or even majority black – cast would eliminate plays like stoning mary by debbie tucker green or Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads by Roy Williams from the canon of black British theatre’ and ‘to define black British theatre in terms of race alone is to miss the point’.

This chapter will explore why writing for the stage was an important contributor to the development of a culturally political syntax as derived from the African and Caribbean diaspora. However, when fashioned to represent second-generation, British-based experiences, its dramatists became overwhelmingly associated with one genre, that of social realism.

In the US, the twenty-first century is powered, in poetic terms, by what its central literary journal recently named ‘the new lyric studies’. It focused fora on the return of interest in lyric as a genre, while millennial poetry anthologies argued that, after long rule by ‘Language poetry’ (America's powerful avant-garde defined, in part, against lyric writing), we had entered an era of the ‘post-avant’, and that poets of all stripes were returning to lyric in new-century work. There are connections between this phenomenon and the burgeoning use of lyric in the work of black British poets. The reasons for having (to a lesser extent) sidelined lyric for a time are different for the latter, of course, and the reasons for re-exploring it are as various as the poets who will be treated here. But they add up to more than the pendulum swing that in part accounts for lyric's return stateside, where primarily aesthetic concerns drive the mix-and-matching of modes dubbed the new American hybridity. This chapter will consider the differing reasons for lyric's return in black British poetics by first taking a broad look at the field, and then by attending to the work of several poets publishing most visibly since the millennium – ranging from innovative writers acclaimed by the mainstream, like Patience Agbabi, to those whose work has been so new in texture, tone and project that they still do not appear on many poetic maps, like D. S. Marriott. I want to argue, as I have in the past, that lyric, in the general sense of being ‘the genre of personal expression’, as Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins describe it in The Lyric Theory Reader, has always been crucial to raced poetry in the UK because it queries that tacit collation of the personal and universal – a collation that ironically makes lyric the least personal of genres, in a sense (or in theory). After postmodernism's thorough-going investigations of how language overwrites the (‘generalised’) subject, post-postmodern lyric investigations of neglected subjectivities are proving increasingly necessary in black British work.

The uses and functions of autobiography as witnessing, testimony or as autoethnography continue to present as urgent questions of authority, ethics, legitimacy and truth. These are the issues that have become the central preoccupation of autobiographical theory and criticism. The privileging of these autobiographical forms by writers marginalised in Anglo-European traditions of literature and criticism has provided an opportunity for writers and critics to invigorate a form that has looked increasingly ‘disreputable and self-indulgent’ and to extend autobiography's limits, while not abandoning its commitment to an authorial presence that is generically defined. The autobiographical self, while central to the narratives discussed in this chapter, occupies multiple subject positions: at the borders and in the margins of dominant discourses of race, gender and nationality, but also at the centre of a growing body of self-representation that seeks to replace the ‘white male story’ with the whole story of lives made hitherto invisible. The diversity and instability of the selves that black British women's autobiography constructs serve as a caution against an insistence on the authority of marginalised voices that in the process reproduce ‘the imperializing tendencies of the old Cartesian self’. Necessary safeguards need to be erected against both the articulation of either an exceptional exemplar or an overdetermining ‘we’.

As Kate Douglas has noted, critical examinations of autobiography and autobiographical forms provide a perfect location from which issues of generic identity, authority and authorship, as well as complex questions of voice and subjectivity (who is speaking, and from where), continue to be negotiated. In addition, as a site where the public and private interconnect, autobiography provides a space in literary criticism for the exploration of issues of narrative responsibility and the ethics of disclosure. These intra- and extra-textual entanglements are the contexts within which identities – gendered, cultural, social and political – are interrogated, disturbed and reconfigured. Within the space of this short, exploratory chapter my focus is, therefore, necessarily narrow. It is impossible to address in detail the complexities of black/Black, British, gendered identities, and so I follow the tendency in contemporary literary criticism to use ‘black’ to denote authors and protagonists of African heritage. I have also structured a discussion of selected texts around their representation of experiences of trauma that perhaps inevitably, as I demonstrate, characterise contemporary autobiographical self-articulation.

The Western reader who sits down to read the literary works most Hindus would identify as classics is often in for a surprise, especially about the way in which religious and theological discourse cohabits with aesthetic expression and popular piety in these texts. In the Hindu context the interaction between religion and literature is usually assumed to be benign and often symbiotic: literary expression reflects religious texts and values and religious specialists welcome the support of literary expression. In the Judeo-Christian world, by contrast, there is an inherent tension between religion – or more precisely revelation – and poetics: theologians and clergymen have often cast a nervous eye on the arts, and artists and writers find they must defy the clerics and their orthodoxies to express themselves fully. Blasphemy – or at least transgression – acts as a kind of strange attractor for Western artists, and it is often a major source of the energy that drives their choices of form, genre, and trope. It is not so in the canonical works of Hinduism: the Mahabharata (and its embedded lyrical drama, the Bhagavad Gita), the Ramayana, and the play Shakuntala to name only the most revered.

Before attempting to sketch the aesthetic and theological issues at stake in this difference, it is probably wise to canvas briefly the vexed question of the definition of Hinduism and its relationship to Sanskrit, the language in which these classics were originally written and performed. In the first place, religious studies specialists today generally like to repeat what has become a truism: that Hinduism is a relatively late and artificial portmanteau term whose frequent use is a colonial artifact under which are grouped a vast array of diverse religious views and practices. As such – or so the argument goes – Hinduism is no more than a convenient term imposed from without on phenomena that are otherwise quite disparate and cannot be addressed except on a case-by-case basis.

It is arguably the case, however, that the term “Hinduism” is nevertheless indispensable, both as a gateway to understanding and as pointing to a conceptual unity and existential stance toward life among these practices and viewpoints that most Hindus themselves assume to underlie their religious traditions.

Logica Vetus (or Old Logic, hereafter LV) is the set of logical works that had been in circulation in the Latin West before the wave of new translations of Aristotle's remaining logical treatises, called Logica Nova (or New Logic, LN), became available. These treatises cover fundamental philosophical issues, including the division of everything into categories, the nature of the relationship between language, thought and reality, the structure of linguistic terms and sentences, the character of definitions, the status of universals, modal reasoning, and the nature of truth, to name just the big topics. LV is sometimes thought of as Boethian logic, since all but one of the texts were made available by the hand of the fifth-century Boethius (c. 480–525/6). Boethius aimed to translate from Greek to Latin all the works of Plato and Aristotle and to provide detailed commentaries on them, although only Aristotle's Categories and On Interpretation, as well as an introduction to the Categories, called Isagoge, written by the third-century Neoplatonist Porphyry (c. 234–c. 305), were transmitted to the Latin West. Medieval scholars also inherited from Boethius lengthy commentaries written to explain every line of the original material and, since Boethius’ habit was to refer to other ancient commentators’ critical arguments and interpretations when giving his own, these commentaries preserved a rich heritage of the late ancient reception of Aristotelian logic. In addition to Isagoge, Categories and On Interpretation, the LV included a twelfth-century treatise written to supplement Categories, known as Book of Six Principles (Liber de sex principiis, hereafter LSP). While other Boethian treatises were included in this set in the twelfth century, they gradually fell out of circulation when the LN became available.

The texts of LV played a major role in university instruction. Taking note of how they were studied provides insight into the ways they were interpreted. Accordingly the first section of this chapter will outline the ways this material was used by masters and students. Given that philosophers often engaged in metalogical reflections about the subject matter of logic itself, a brief review of the principal shifts in the characterizations of logic during this period will follow.

INTRODUCTION

In the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the writings of Aristotle became central to the logic curriculum (see Chapters 4 and 5). However, in a number of new developments, some topics with which Aristotle had not been concerned now began to make an appearance, and went on to become crucial within the tradition. These innovations were not regarded as an alternative to the Aristotelian logic, but rather supplemented it under the heading “logic of the moderns” (logica moderna or logica modernorum) (De Rijk 1962–1967). Probably the most prominent among the new topics were the doctrines of the so-called properties of terms (proprietates terminorum), which are generally considered the basis for later medieval semantic theorising and adjacent issues.

Terms (termini) in the technical sense presupposed here (and pointing to the “terminist” tradition) are descriptive words which function as subject or predicate in a proposition. The basic idea of the “properties” (or terministic) approach is that an analysis of the semantics of (compound) linguistic expressions should proceed by analysing the semantic properties of the terms occurring in it. In handbooks of logic from the later Middle Ages, the treatment of the properties started with signification (significatio), the capacity of terms to function as signs; supposition (suppositio), the property of terms functioning as subject or predicate in propositions, was its centrepiece, but the framework also covered related properties like copulation, appellation, ampliation, restriction, and distribution.

In the earlier stages of development, supposition had been one among the other properties with equal standing. From the works of Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard and other less-well-known or anonymous authors, supposition theory began to emerge in the (late) twelfth century, and was then further developed through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Though clearly dependent on grammarian traditions (Ashworth 2010, 152ff.) and closely connected with the theory of fallacies in its early stages, later on the framework developed in response to a variety of sometimes divergent needs in clarifying truth conditions, investigating the validity of inference forms, and making ontological commitments explicit. It is thus important to keep in mind that both across the centuries and in terms of different applications, the doctrines of the properties of terms form a rather heterogeneous collection in terms of function and application, as well as in terms of details of the machinery (Read 2015).

In this chapter we discuss, first, how the Arabic logicians up to the end of the tenth century took over Greek material and added to it material of their own and how they reshaped the subject of logic in the process. We have included references to the young Averroes, although he wrote in the twelfth century, inasmuch as he belongs in the tradition of al-Fārābī (d. 950). After this we turn to the formal innovations of Avicenna's in the early eleventh century. Many of the questions that we discuss are treated also in Street (2004).

THE GREEK LOGICAL HERITAGE

Arabic logic as a branch of philosophy was heir to ancient Greek logic, and it belonged essentially to the Peripatetic tradition. Arabic grammar, Islamic jurisprudence and Islamic disputative theology (kalām) developed independent methods of reasoning and inevitably there was some interaction between these methods and those of logic as a philosophical discipline. This interaction ranged from conflict to absorption. The Greek Peripatetic logic was embodied in Aristotle's logical texts, which later became known as the Organon, together with the commentaries on them by Roman Empire scholars of various philosophical persuasions. These commentaries were the product of an activity which had run for eight centuries when the Arab philosophers became aware of it.

The Arabic Organon was in fact the extended Organon first contemplated in Late Antiquity, which began with Porphyry's Isagoge as an introduction and went on to include Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics. But what was only programmatic in Late Antiquity became a reality for the Arabic logicians. They conceived the Organon as embodying a system of logic. The formal heart of the system lay in its third book, the Prior Analytics, which aims to give the general theory of reasoning or of the syllogism (qiyās). The first two treatises, i.e. Categories (although its place here was challenged, in particular by Avicenna) and On Interpretation, are preparatory to the formal part. The remaining volumes adapt the theory of reasoning to different fields of human activity: to scientific activity, but also to social fields of communication. Logic as providing a method for science was the object of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, while logic as providing a tool in order to systematise various fields of social communication was the object of the rest of the books of the Organon.

In the undergraduate religious studies courses that I teach, I often ask students why they show up, if not just for the sake of required credits. The answer is always, “I want to understand what's going on in the news.” And religion is certainly in the news. The public visibility and awareness of religion in current global affairs compels us to engage the “postsecular” question, although we may or may not be entering a postsecular age if that term is a descriptor for the reemergence of repressed religion after a secular age. This designation implies that religion and the secular can be conceptualized as neatly bounded and easily separable entities, or even consecutive stages on an evolutionary ladder, a questionable assumption.

A better way to define the postsecular is to see that religion and the secular are not polar opposites but have always been interdependent since their coemergence in the modern West. Although defined as apolitical, interior piety by the normative claims of secularism, religion has never been completely contained inside this model. Claiming the separation of church and state or state neutrality toward different religious traditions, secularism itself has proved to be a problem space that is already implicated in religious questions. The postsecular, therefore, is not merely disenchantment with secularism, but rather an effort to reconsider and reconfigure symbolic assumptions, cultivated sensibilities, and power relations associated with religion and to question the secular's claim to epistemic, affective, and moral-political supremacy. The postsecular is particularly attentive to the fluidity of religion as a constructed category, to the varieties of nonmodern, non-Western religious traditions, and to the flourishing of new types of “spiritual” (although almost invariably embodied) practices.

Postsecular reading follows theological reading to challenge the hegemonic universalism of “secular” reason and joins confessional reading to address the failures of the protectionist exclusionism of “secular” aesthetics. But rather than working within the comfort zone of one literature and one religion, postsecular reading ventures outside those boundaries to question the formation of the sacred or sacralization in a whole range of interlinked “secular” spheres.

In the Western cultural imagination, ethics, religion, and literature exist at an uneasy crossroads, a crossroads often marked by mutual suspicion.

Ethics is suspicious of literature for a variety of reasons, although two such reasons surface with some regularity. First, say ethicists, literature is fictive and therefore must be, at some level, fraudulent. Second, literature stirs the emotions and so can incite and prolong unregulated and disordered desire. Plato's view of literature is more nuanced than his censorship of poets might suggest, but their ban is real nevertheless. And it is not as though these ethical worries have no basis in fact. Every genocide begins with a good story – a compelling narrative about the inhumanity of its victims that incites neighbor to kill neighbor. Literature professors love to talk about the deeper truths revealed by stories, but stories can also propagate – and prop up – horrendous lies. Stories are not necessarily true, but they are powerful, as Plato well understood.

On the other hand, literature, particularly contemporary literature, is often suspicious of ethics. Few epithets are as demeaning to an author as “pedantic,” a term critics find useful when they sniff out moral agendas in a poem or novel. Many twenty-first century readers agree, perhaps unthinkingly, with Archibald MacLeish: “A poem should not mean / But be,” itself a baldly didactic claim.

Sometimes these ethical worries about literature and literary worries about ethics are elided with religious concerns. Among the poets Plato bans from the Republic are those who tell false stories about immoral, duplicitous, and violent gods. When Augustine, in the Confessions, berates himself for crying over Dido, he worries that his empathy for a fictional tragedy will displace sorrow over his own distance from God. English translations of the Bible from the fourteenth century onward inveigh against the “vain imaginations” of human thought that may substitute fantasies for true words about God and the world. And yet narratives and lyrics, stories and poems, are integral to religious accounts, as the chapters in Part III of this volume demonstrate. Most, if not all, religious traditions understand themselves through one or more overarching narratives. There is a story or stories to be told of how a community practices its faith.

THE LIMITATIONS OF ARISTOTELIAN SYLLOGISTIC AND THE NEED FOR NON-SYLLOGISTIC CONSEQUENCES

Medieval theories of consequences are theories of logical validity, providing tools to judge the correctness of various forms of reasoning. Although Aristotelian syllogistic was regarded as the primary tool for achieving this, the limitations of syllogistic with regard to valid non-syllogistic forms of reasoning, as well as the limitations of formal deductive systems in detecting fallacious forms of reasoning in general, naturally provided the theoretical motivation for its supplementation with theories dealing with non-syllogistic, non-deductive, as well as fallacious inferences. We can easily produce deductively valid forms of inference that are clearly not syllogistic, as in propositional logic or in relational reasoning, or even other types of sound reasoning that are not strictly deductively valid, such as enthymemes, probabilistic arguments, and inductive reasoning, while we can just as easily provide examples of inferences that appear to be legitimate instances of syllogistic forms, yet are clearly fallacious (say, because of equivocation). For Aristotle himself, this sort of supplementation of his syllogistic was provided mostly in terms of the doctrine of “immediate inferences” in his On Interpretation, various types of non-syllogistic or even non-deductive inferences in the Topics, and the doctrine of logical fallacies, in his Sophistical Refutations. Taking their cue primarily from Aristotle (but drawing on Cicero, Boethius, and others), medieval logicians worked out in systematic detail various theories of non-syllogistic inferences, sometimes as supplementations of Aristotelian syllogistic, sometimes as merely useful devices taken to be reducible to syllogistic, and sometimes as more comprehensive theories of valid inference, containing syllogistic as a special, and important, case.

A BRIEF SURVEY OF HISTORICAL SOURCES

Accordingly, the characteristically medieval theories of non-syllogistic inferences were originally inspired by Aristotle's logical works other than his Analytics. Aristotle's relevant ideas were handed down to medieval thinkers by Boethius’ translations of and commentaries on Porphyry's Isagoge and Aristotle's Categories and On Interpretation, along with Boethius’ own logical works, the most relevant to the development of consequences being his De Hypotheticis Syllogismis and De Topicis Differentiis.

The main advances in logical investigations in the thirteenth century in the Latin West were concentrated at the Universities of Paris and Oxford. There were other universities and studia generalia, such as Cambridge, Erfurt and elsewhere, where logic was taught, and on which both Oxford and Paris depended for their students, and to which they despatched many of their masters after their studies in Arts. But the real originality in driving forward the logica modernorum, the real innovations in developing the theories of properties of terms, of consequence, of obligations theory and the treatment of insolubles, is found for the most part in the work of masters teaching at Paris and Oxford.

All this had changed by the end of the fourteenth century. By 1400, there were many more universities, particularly in northern Europe, starting with the German universities established at Prague, Vienna, Erfurt and Heidelberg, and in southern Europe there was a revival and extension of the study of logic in Italy and Spain. In the meantime, the Black Death, striking first from 1347 to 1349, and again in 1361 and 1369 (and repeatedly for the next 300 years or so), although reducing the population by at least one-third, had surprisingly not reduced the output of logical treatises, even if it affected their vitality. Nor had the Papal Schism (see Section 6.5) apparently affected the study of logic, but if anything served to disseminate it more broadly.

Returning to the start of the fourteenth century, all real interest in logic was arguably preserved by those working in Oxford. This is the thesis propounded by Ebbesen (1985). We are, of course, dependent for our understanding of historical developments on historical traces, in particular, what logical treatises have been preserved – and indeed, on which of those that have been preserved have been studied. Nonetheless, it does seem that interest in logic waned at Paris towards the end of the thirteenth century in the face of the rise of modism, with its fascination with grammar and the so-called “modes of signification”. Hitherto, univocation had united a term with a single signification throughout the different things for which it supposited: e.g. the signification of ‘man’ is the same though the term supposits for different classes of men in ‘Some man is running’ and ‘Socrates was a man’.

In his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Oscar Wilde offers the reader a manifesto for modern aestheticism, a philosophy of beauty that is essentially a concern for form – for beauty and the manifestations of beauty in themselves. According to Wilde, the integrity of form and therefore the integrity of a work of art can be secured only by excluding the concerns of philosophy and ethics, of truth and goodness, which always threaten to harness what is beautiful for the service of something extrinsic and secondary to it. “Form is absolutely essential,” we are later told (209), but as importantly: nothing else is. “Beautiful things mean only beauty,” says Wilde, and therefore there “is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all” (1). “All art is quite useless” precisely because aesthetic form, the dimensions of the beautiful thing, is the final and highest reality: there is nothing more ultimate than beauty and so nothing outside itself that it should serve, and this form resides in “surface and symbol” (2).

Wilde's manifesto for modern aestheticism is a confession, and in The Picture of Dorian Gray Wilde offers two confessional readings of the protagonist by Lord Henry Wotton and Basil Hallward that begin in the presumption that artistic form can be protected only by way of exclusion. In the novel, we witness two versions of aestheticism coordinated by beauty's respective conditions of surface and symbol and represented by the noble lord and the diligent painter, both of whom vie for the soul of that innocent, “unspotted” beauty, Dorian Gray. How they initially understand what it means to have a concern for form, and where Wilde has it lead them, provides a cautionary tale regarding the whole enterprise of literary study and indeed of any aesthetic activity defined by its concern for form and understood as a “secular,” that is to say, as a separated and self-grounding mode of inquiry premised on an act of exclusion.