The Search for Identity in Black British Women’s Drama: An Analysis of Jackie Kay’s Chiaroscuro and Winsome Pinnock’s Talking in Tongues

Abstract

Black British women cannot be counted amongst those female playwrights who have profited from the “revolution” within British theatre – a development which Heidi Stephenson and Natasha Langridge have attributed to the last decade. Many, especially feminist, scholars have pointed to the fact that black women are marginalized as well as silenced in British cultural and political discourses and regimes of representation. Consequently, the search for identity very often is an issue black female playwrights are concerned with in their writings about black women’s lives. Drawing on African-American, but mainly British scholarly discourses of performance and dramatic texts as well as on theories of identity and representation, this paper analyzes the ways in which Jackie Kay’s Chiaroscuro and Winsome Pinnock’s Talking in Tongues represent black female identities. It will argue that both playwrights portray black women’s search for identity as an ongoing process of becoming and depict black female identity as complex and simultaneously influenced by and interwoven with issues of race, gender, sexuality and belonging.