Reimagining the Victorian Past in African and in Black Diasporic Theatre. A Talk by Tiziana Morosetti

About this event

The second of three events in the CCL Postcolonial Theatre series, May 2022

Centre for Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths, University of London

Several African American and Black British playwrights have engaged in the past 25 years with material from the Victorian past. If issues of slavery and segregation have been at the forefront, aligning theatre to neo-Victorian and neo-Slavery narratives, Black playwrights have also engaged with specific figures from the long 19th century, from Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus (1996), which first brought on the contemporary stage the story of Sarah Baartman (or the ‘Hottentot Venus’), to Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon (2014), which rewrites Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859) while also addressing (quite literally) the presence and relevance of Boucicault on the British stage.