Goldsmiths - University of London

Dr Deirdre Osborne

After training as a classical ballet dancer, Deirdre Osborne studied Classics at the University of Melbourne, English Literature at Kings College London and completed her PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London where she also taught. Her other literature teaching work includes: the Open University, London South Bank University and the University of Westminster. Whilst deputy Head of Education at HMP Wandsworth she concurrently developed her interests in prison theatre as an actor and associate director with Bob Taylor’s Inside Job Theatre in Prisons Project. In 2001 Roger Graef’s Artistic Convictions television series featured a documentary film about her production of Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba with the women of HMP Holloway, directed by Lucy Fyson. Her research interests cover late-Victorian literature, focusing upon fin-de-siecle imperialism, colonial ideology, indigenousness and the relationship between maternity and nationhood in Britain and Australia for which she was an Australian Bicentennial Scholar (1999-2000). She also writes about the representations of women and espionage in World War II. Her current research concentrates upon contemporary Black British writers (drama, poetry and prose) and she has received an Arts and Humanities Research Council award and an Individual Bursary from the Arts Council to work on a monograph on this subject as part of the Diaspora, Migration and Identities project. This year she has received a CELT Fellowship and an award from the Modern Humanities Research Association. She is a member of the Black Theatre Association (US), Modern Languages Association, American Association for Australian Literary Studies and reviews for Wasafiri, Contemporary Theatre Review and SABLE. From 13th-14th March 2008, she is co-convening an international conference at Goldsmiths, “On Whose Terms?: Critical Negotiations in Black British Literature and the Arts” - one that both celebrates and critically engages with the field - with Professor Mark Stein (University of Muenster, Germany) and Dr. Godfrey Brandt (Birkbeck College) whom she invited to take part in the project. See http://www.OnWhoseTerms.org or e-mail OnWhoseTerms@gold.ac.uk. Her edited anthology Hidden Gems (London: Oberon Books, 2008) will be launched at the conference, of plays by Lemn Sissay, Lennie James, Mojisola Adebayo, Valerie Mason-John, Courttia Newland, Malika Booker and Paul Morris and accompanying critical essays. She is also organising a short story competition in memory of John La Rose (New Beacon Bookers, Caribbean Artists Movement, Radical Book Fair), details of which will be published on the Goldsmiths’ website and the winner announced 13th March, 2008. Inquiries about research supervision are welcome in any of the following areas: the late-Victorian period, contemporary Black British writing, woman and war, gender and prisons, motherhood and nation-building.

Research interests

CROSS-DISCIPLINARY STRAND

1. “I ain’t British though / Yes you are. You’re as English as I am”: Belonging and Unbelonging in Black British Drama” in Ulrike Lindner, Maren Mohring, Mark Stein and Silke Strothe eds., Hybrid Cultures, Nervous States: Britain and Germany in a (Post)Colonial World. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2010.
   
   For black artists in Britain the divisions engendered by racial politics have produced longstanding contortions of positive status and identity, and a legacy of disenfranchisement, which is hardly favourable to either creativity or progress. Until the late-twentieth century, black people in Britain served as a representational presence rather than experiencing opportunities for authentic creative agency in white-dominated cultural arenas. Although exceeding the compass of this discussion, the issue of male-preferential treatment remains central in contemporary theatre histories -- despite the ongoing work by women drama practitioners and academics operating at the forefront of the directing, writing, performing, archiving and critical processes. Two neo-millennial plays by male black British dramatists will be briefly discussed -- novelist and playwright Courttia Newland’s A Question of Courage (2006), as well as actor and writer Lennie James’ international commission The Sons of Charlie Paora (2004) -- with reference to Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads (2002) and Joe Guy (2007) by the most prolific black playwright in Britain today, Roy Williams. Each play foregrounds social negotiations through the prism of race, centralising black characters -- or brown characters, in the case of James’ play -- to dramatise their interactions with members of the white-majority contexts they inhabit. They attend to traditional spaces of social exclusion (urban ghettoisation), problematic geographical and demographical spaces (the English countryside, ex-colonies) and also to the specific kind of visibility for black people in cultural institutions (sport).
   
   
   
2. Chapter 14. “The Body of Text Meets the Body as Text: Staging (I)dentity in the work of SuAndi and Lemn Sissay” in in Charlie Armstrong, Sean Crosson and Anne Karhio eds. Contemporary Poetry in Crisis London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
   
   Two of Britain’s foremost contemporary black poets, SuAndi and Lemn Sissay perform autobiographical monodramas that intimately dramatise their odysseys to self-knowledge through retrieving and paying homage to their respective mothers’ struggles - in raising or rejecting them - in a hostile surrounding society. The term monodrama (both SuAndi and Sissay play characters), rather than solo performance or Dee Heddon’s autobiography in performance, acknowledges the complex fusion of forms and traditions. Their trans-generic methodologies cross-fertilise traditions of spoken-word poetry, dramatic monologue, and confessional techniques. As conduits for their written texts, SuAndi and Sissay literally and literarily perform themselves into being. Their physical bodies articulate the texts (visually and verbally) and the body politic which has inscribed their social identities in racialising and gendered ways, is de-scribed and re-written. Both poets produce an experiential aesthetics that testifies to the tenuous and often troubled routes to self-worth that confront indigenous black Britons both socially and culturally.  
   
   
3. Set in Stone: SuAndi and Lemn Sissay’s Landmark Poetics.” in Arturo Cass and Cordelia Grobner eds. Performing Poetry: Race, Place and Gender in Performance Poetry Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2010.
   
   On September 4th, 2008, amid a sea of pinstripe-suited white (predominantly male) City workers, Lemn Sissay, one of Britain’s foremost poets, proclaimed his poem “The Gilt of Cain” (set in Michael Visocchi’s sculpture), at its unveiling by Emeritus Archbishop Desmond Tutu – one of the few black people present. It confirmed the capabilities of poetry as a heightened form of “word-in-space” (Ong), where Sissay’s contemporaneous (yet ultimately ephemeral) delivery and its setting in stone for perpetuity activated multiple performances, making it a simultaneously oral, aural, visual, typographic and grapholectic enterprise. To explore the performativity activated by my term “landmark poetics”, I draw upon de Certeau’s poetic valuing of the everyday life that thrives amid the gaps of larger power structures. The linguistic modalities illustrated in his “Pedestrian speech acts” invite such application.  Unlike poetry spoken or performed aloud, the reception of landmark poetics is unmediated orally or aurally (the poet is not normally physically present during its infinite deliveries). Its actualising is dependent upon the paradox of public introspection - in the mind’s eye and internal voice - of the reader and spectator. A literal and literary interface is created between the concrete and the abstract; an ensemble of relations juxtaposing past/present, local/international, to function as a memorial and commemoration, public art and public record. Sissay’s examples are discussed alongside the work of his contemporary, SuAndi, whose poems are inscribed in Manchester’s first black public monument at Dulcie School (now demolished) and in the promenade of poetry plaques, “Words on the Discs” that line Salford’s centenary walkway to the Lowry Arts Centre, Manchester. 
   
   
4. Inheritors of the Diaspora: Contemporary Black British Poetry, Drama and Prose London: Northcote Press, (forthcoming)
   
   Black British literature is one of the fastest growing fields in publishing and since the new millennium this momentum has included drama in mainstream theatres. This book is a wide-ranging resource which gives a comprehensive critical introduction to the work of indigenous Black writers of African descent (1995-present). It uniquely views literature (fiction and poetry) in conjunction with drama (and performance) to consider the development of aesthetic paradigms and issues surrounding canonicity, post-race thinking and cultural citizenship. It contributes to recognising the work of contemporary Black British writers as permanent and expected constituents of British literary history. 
   
   
5. Contributing Editor. Contemporary Black British Women’s Writing  Special Issue for Women: A Cultural Review Vol.20; No.3 December, 2009.
   
   1. “Longevity and Critical Legitimacy: the ‘So-Called’ Literary Tradition Versus the ‘Actual’ Cultural Network” 239-49.
   2. “Andrea Levy in Conversation with Blake Morrison” ed. Deirdre Osborne
   
   In 2006 the Contemporary Women Writers Network held their annual conference in Bangor, Wales - a conference whose literary ledger did not enter a single black British author. That same year, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Donna Daley-Clarke’s Lazy Eye and Valerie Mason-John’s Borrowed Body (all published in 2005) garnered critical acclaim and various literary prizes: the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Commonwealth First Novel Prize, Eurasia region and the MIND Book of the Year award.  Clearly, a significant discounting of a dimension of contemporary British literature occurred at this academic event. Perhaps in response to this occlusion, the 2008 CWWN conference focused upon diasporic women writers. From complete exclusion to retrospective compensatory special inclusion alerts us to the academy’s reticence to conceive of black British writers as expected constituents of British literary culture. This Special Issue on contemporary black British women’s writing, responds to, resists and writes against such disregard. It does not propose a case for inclusion but operates from the assumption that the work is already at the heart of contemporary literature – even if it is frequently marginalised by mainstream academic discourses.  Critical legitimation is always an important step to cultural longevity. In this issue, the contributing essayists are women who have vociferously championed the work of black writers in many contexts - education, publishing, live performance – for many years, both in the UK and abroad. Their subjects cover a range of contemporary black British women writers: novelists (Andrea Levy, Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, Diana Evans, Bernadine Evaristo, Valerie Mason-John), life writers and biographers (Yvonne Brewster, Jacqueline Walker), dramatist (debbie tucker green), poets and spoken-word artists (Dorothea Smartt, Patience Agbabi, SuAndi, Jackie Kay) whose work has created its own aesthetic legacy and one which cannot be ignored in accounting for Britain’s (multi)cultural literary landscape today

HISTORY STRAND

1. “Conceiving the Nation: Visions and Versions of Colonial Pre-natality” in Claudia Klaver and Ellen Rosenmann eds. Other Mothers: Beyond the Maternal Ideal Ohio State University Press, 2008. 202-226.
   
   In addressing fictional enactments of the man -woman debate that generated an explosion of polemic in both fin-de-siècle Britain and Australia, the Australian rural colonial (bush) woman embodies an as yet unaddressed dimension of the New Woman phenomenon. Moreover, she may expose the limitations facing the European woman who, in comparison, remained more closely embroiled in the imperialist power structure, and is in fact less re visionary than accounts have to date suggested.  Whilst recent scholarship has extensively investigated degenerative imperialism and the ideology of motherhood at the source of empire, the extent to which many imperialist paradigms were re-worked in the unique conditions provided by the colonised spaces requires further retrieval. The emancipatory features of the New Woman and her multiplicitous identity are evident in representations emerging from the colonial arena. Reconfigurations of women’s roles appear to be more radical in some colonial representations than those produced within imperialist Britain. These I suggest are intimately related to the impossibility of replaying the familial model exported with the imperial project, in a colonial landscape. In fact, I propose that it is the colonial woman’s displacement from Euro-centric urban domesticity, which produces a radical relationship with issues concerning gender role revisions.
   
   
2. Chapter.II “Writing Black Back: An Overview of Black Theatre and Performance in Britain”  in Dimple Godiwala ed. Alternatives Within the Mainstream: British Black and Asian Theatre  Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006.61-81
   
   Black people have lived in Britain longer than they have in the USA and yet, until the closing decade of the twentieth century, their contribution to British theatre has received limited and short-lived attention. In this chapter I trace a trajectory of representation of black people in theatre from the early modern through to the pre-Windrush period to recognize that which has paved the way to the increasing visibility of contemporary black British playwrights of African descent in theatre of the new millennium. 
   
   
3. “ ‘I do not know about politics or governments...I am a housewife’: the female secret agent and the male war machine in Occupied France (1942-1945)” Women: a Cultural Review Special Issue Women and War, Vol.17, no.1 Spring, 2006. 42-64
   
   In assuming war roles that led to participation in combat, torture or death, women secret agents in World War II exemplify the permeable nature of the barrier that separates femininity and masculinity in the ideology and practice of waging war. The straightforwardness of a male-exclusive sovereignty over war (with the military as ultimate protector of vulnerable femininity) became unsettled by the drafting and uniforming of women and the systematic German bombing of the British Home Front.  There were fifty-five women agents who passed through the Beaulieu Finishing School for Secret Agents in Britain (1941-45) In terms of suspense and tragedy genres, their war service experiences provide the ingredients for gripping drama. The lives of two women in particular have been captured in male-generated narratives, written and filmed. These accounts of Odette (nee Brailly then Sansom) Churchill and Violette (nee Bushell) Szabo serve as demonstrations of how texts participate in the standardising of the past to produce a specific disenfranchising of women from the representation of war unless it occurs within very prescriptive and traditionally conservative criteria. As post-war representations, the outcome of the story is already known and one in which the re-establishing of strict gender differences (blurred during wartime imperatives) was underway. Whatever acts of sabotage and violence these women agents (who were also mothers of daughters) undertook during wartime, a seamless reinstatement to domestic contentment as hostilities ceased was socially assumed. Filtered through male-authoring creativity, the longevity of the effectiveness of their war role is implicitly undermined to acutely reveal the investment of male-authoring cultural representation in perpetuating the male mythopoeia of war.
   
   
4. Critically Black: Black British Dramatists and Theatre of the New Millennium  (Manchester University Press)
   
   This monograph offers comprehensive critical attention to the drama of the new millennium produced by contemporary black writers in Britain who, writing from an indigenous British identity and standpoint, have sustained a prominence in mainstream contexts in the UK and abroad, which was not achieved by their theatrical forebears. In centralising black people’s experience as a matter of course, Kwame Kwei-Armah, debbie tucker green, Roy Williams and Lemn Sissay insert radical experiential revisions to conceptions of national culture. Although their work is the focus, the book makes selective reference to the work of other contemporary black and white dramatists in order to elicit comparisons and contrasts as they serve the scope of the study. As black indigenous Britons, the four writers inherit the legacies of British theatre; theatre practice, performance, historiography and archiving which persistently restricted and even rendered invisible, black people’s presence and input until the mid-twentieth century. The project traces how legacies of restriction and exclusion interface with traditional British theatre heritage as formative influences upon these writers, but significantly, begins from the standpoint of their automatic constituency within British culture (as indigenous Britons) rather than building some kind of case for their inclusion.  It is the first book to offer detailed attention to two influential contexts that shape the reception of black dramatists: (i) theatre critics and reviews (ii) the ways in which two distinct routes (literary and performance studies) offer an unsatisfactory separation of critical approaches, each with its own shortcomings and strengths. The project identifies the need for critical languages which can meet the demands of the formal and experiential aesthetics the writers forge as they frequently slip between and re-work literary genres and performance traditions.

INTER-CULTURAL STRAND

1. Editor. Hidden Gems ed. London: Oberon Books, 2008.
   
   This distinctive new volume of drama by black British playwrights exemplifies how experiments with form, subject-matter and genre, can serve to centralise the experiences of black people in local, national and international contexts of culture, politics and performance. Each play is critically introduced, to create an anthology of interactions - between the people who have long championed the work through teaching and writing about it and the people who produce, perform and explain their intentions behind it. 
   
   The beautiful thing about Hidden Gems lies not in the diversity and merit of the plays – not even in the joys of learning truths hitherto not articulated in this way – but in the recording of black British voices so strong, so vibrant, that our presence in the frontline of literary achievements can now never be denied. Kwame Kwei-Armah (playwright)
   
   Hidden Gems is far more than a collection of contemporary plays with introductory comments. I believe it will be viewed as a unique and indispensable record locating Black writers in the current cultural record with such perceptiveness and acuity that it may authentically be regarded in hindsight as a coalescing moment in international theory and performance. One may argue that the highlight of this truly significant volume is Dr Osborne’s own brilliant introduction to Sissay’s stunning Something Dark. Professor Lauri Ramey (Director, Center for Contemporary Poetics, State University of California, Los Angeles)
   
   
2. Chapter III. “The State of the Nation: Contemporary Black British Theatre and the Staging of the UK” in Dimple Godiwala ed. Alternatives Within the Mainstream: British Black and Asian Theatre  Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006. 82-100
   
   The unprecedented mainstream programming and staging of plays by Black British dramatists characterises London’s theatrescape of the new millennium. In contrasting ways, the plays of Kwei-Armah, Williams and Daley expose general issues and themes through the centrality of Black British experiences. These writers represent a new generation of indigenous Black British cultural assertion, demanding perpetual inclusion in the British cultural psyche where white-dominated theatrical hegemonies remain evident. 
   
   
3. Chapter 15. “Not ‘in-yer-face’ but what lies beneath: experiential and aesthetic inroads in the drama of debbie tucker green and Dona Daley” in R. Victoria Arana ed. “Black” British Aesthetics Today Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007. 222-242  
   
   In the new millennium where white men still clearly dominate the theatrical terrain, the staging of Black British women’s drama still remains at best, rare. debbie tucker green and Dona Daley distinctively dramatise articulations of the experientially uncharacteristic in British theatre. They produce sustained experimentation with form, style and subject matter to assert black experience as universal. Whilst Daley employs unqualified naturalism in her dramatisation of the mundane intimacies that weave lives together (using patois throughout), tucker green blows this apart with a blitz on the comfort zones of theatrical realism both in terms of linguistic creativity, verbal freefall and taboo topics. Adding to the established legacy of Winsome Pinnock, Trish Cooke and Zindika, Daley and tucker green provide further evidence to the key ways in which women dramatists articulate sensibilities and perspectives arising from their positions within culture and theatre that are distinct from those of their male contemporaries. 
   
   
4. ‘No Straight Answers: Mojisola Adebayo and Valerie Mason-John discuss their writing for theatre and performance’ New Theatre Quarterly (February, 2009)
   
   Mojisola Adebayo and Valerie Mason-John are two distinctive voices in contemporary writing and performance - representing Afro-Queer diasporic heritage through the specific experience of being black, British and lesbian. Creating continuities from contorted or erased histories (personal, social and cultural) their drama demonstrates both Afro-centric and European theatrical influences, which in Mason-John’s case, is further consolidated in her polemic, poetry and prose. Like Britain’s most innovative and prominent contemporary black woman dramatist, debbie tucker green, they reach beyond local or national identity politics, to represent universal themes and to centralise black women’s experiences. With subject-matter that includes royal families, the care system, racial cross-dressing and global ecology, Adebayo and Mason-John have individually forged a unique aesthetic and perspective in work which links environmental degradation with social disenfranchisement and travels to the heart of whiteness along black-affirming imaginative routes. 
   
   
5. "‘Know Whence you Came’: Dramatic Art and Black British Identity” New Theatre Quarterly Vol.XXIII Part 3 August, 2007. 253-263.
   
   Kwame Kwei-Armah’s play Elmina’s Kitchen achieved a landmark in British theatre history as the first drama by an indigenous black writer to be staged in London’s commercial West End. The play’s success since its premiere at the Royal National Theatre includes a national tour and a season at the Baltimore theatre USA directed by August Wilson’s director Marion McClinton. In this interview Kwei-Armah testifies to Wilson’s considerable influence and the inspiration he derives from Wilson’s project to account for the history of black people’s experience in every decade of the twentieth century.