race issues
Thomas H. Green
The debut album by Australian-Ghanaian artist Genesis Owusu is so musically restless it’s exhilarating. What’s clear is this guy doesn’t want to be placed in a box, marked hip hop or anything else. Over a wild variety of music, he adopts multiple vocal styles, reminding of beatbox genius Reggie Watts (most especially his recent Wajatta project with John Tejada). The album cover encapsulates the cinematic, occasionally garish persona that comes across during the 15 tracks. What’s clear is that Genesis Owusu is no wall flower.Running through Smiling With No Teeth is the theme of a “black dog”. Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
As the events of last year made clear, the police have a problem with race on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK, BAME people are more than twice as likely to die in police custody while being forcibly restrained than people from other social groups. Written by award-winning actor and writer Ryan Calais Cameron, Typical is a powerful and inspiring example of how theatre tackles institutional racism. First performed in 2019 at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the play then transferred to the Soho Theatre for a sell-out run. Now, during the pandemic, this piece has been filmed on location at Read more ...
Liz Thomson
I suspect that the work of James Baldwin is not all that familiar to readers in Britain, perhaps not even to black readers in Britain – just as, for a time at least, it seemed that Martin Luther King, a much more visible figure in black history whose words are routinely quoted, became obscured by rather blingier modern-day figures.Yet, as a number of commentators have noted, Baldwin is the figure we need to turn to in the age of Trump, the man who long ago told us that “It is certain… that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have." Amen to that. The film Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
In 1964, Cassius Clay, NFL superstar Jim Nathaniel Brown, soul legend Sam Cooke and political firebrand Malcolm X gathered for one night in a dingy room at the Hampton Motel. It was a meeting that became a symbol of hope for black Americans. A photo, taken by Malcolm X would make the moment iconic, marking a shift away from the horrors of Jim Crow America to the passing of the Civil Rights Act. The events of that evening became the basis of Kemp Powers' 2013 play, and now form the directorial debut for Oscar-winning actress Regina King, who most recently played Sister Night in HBO’s Read more ...
Charlie Stone
It is near impossible to imagine what the world would look like today if slavery and colonialism had never existed, let alone to write a book on the subject. Courttia Newland sets himself this daunting task in his latest novel, A River Called Time. Imaginative fiction rubs shoulders with a naturalistic impulse to create the world of the Ark, an alternate reality in which African cultural influences represent the status quo. Rooted in a decolonised narrative style where every turn of phrase brings forth the weight of its cultural implications, A River Called Time is a deeply thoughtful, Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Edition 2 of Living Newspaper: A Counter Narrative, an experimental new piece of online theatre from the Royal Court, doesn’t mess around. Within minutes, a cry of "Tory scum" is echoing around the Jerwood Theatre – the refrain of an anarchic musical number presided over by a mannequin painted blue, wearing a shaggy blond wig. “Kids cant eat but They’re tryna tell/You its the statues that need saving?” raps grime producer Jammz, setting out exactly where the 27 creators of Living Newspaper stand. Those seeking apolitical escapism should look away now. But everything is political, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Seven years ago, at a literary festival in the Croatian port of Pula, I heard Goran Vojnović talk about the vicious petty nationalism that that had poisoned daily life in the republics of former Yugoslavia. At that point the splintering of communities, families, even individual selves, by what one of his characters calls the “barbaric shit” of manufactured conflict between neighbours felt to me like a troubling but still-remote problem. Well, here we are in Britain at the close of 2020, ready to drown in a toxic ocean of the same barbaric shit. Time, perhaps, to pay more heed to the many fine Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The fifth and final film in the Small Axe series is titled Education. At first, it appears this refers to the education of the central character, 12-year-old London boy Kingsley Smith, impressively played by Kenyah Sandy, who’s transferred to a disgraceful “School for the Educationally Subnormal” after being disruptive. However, by the end of the 63-minute drama, it becomes clear the education in question is as much that of his overworked family, who slowly wake up to what’s going on under their noses.The film riffs on McQueen’s own youth. He was put in a “special class” at school and, like Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The third film in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe quintet (BBC One) took for its subject the real-life story of Leroy Logan, the Islington-born son of Jamaican parents who joined the Metropolitan Police in the early Eighties. Despite encountering racism and prejudice, and having the local West Indian kids calling him “Judas” and “coconut”, he rose through the ranks to become a Superintendent.However, this account by McQueen and co-writer Courttia Newland omitted that last bit and focused on Leroy’s early days on the force, after he’d taken the decision to abandon a promising career as a research Read more ...
theartsdesk
The infamous border wall. Prolonged detention. Children in cages. Even as Biden's election promises a sea change in Trump's devastatingly hardline immigration policy, immigrants, both first- and second-generation, face a spectrum of prejudice, violence and categorisation in the increasingly divided "land of the free". In the wide-ranging collection The Good Immigrant USA, editors Chimene Suleyman and Nikesh Shukla make it their aim to "finally let immigrants be in charge of their own narrative" as writers and artists from Teju Cole to Jenny Zhang and Chiogizie Obioma to Dani Fernandez Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When the world was in lockdown and performers turned to TikTok to keep in touch with their fans, Sarah Cooper started using the online platform for short videos where she lip-synced Donald Trump's speeches, and they quickly went global. Not many people can say they owe worldwide fame to Covid and America's worst-ever president.Now Cooper has a very good special on Netflix, and it shows that there is so much more to the actress and writer than her TikTok fame. But then those short videos showed what a great actor she is, with every twitch of the eye and curl of the lip neatly capturing Trump's Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Broadway tends to be the Darwinian environment where a show's opening night can also mark its closing. But such has been the Covid-prompted fate of the National Theatre's fiery return to the fray that Death of England: Delroy managed 11 performances before shuddering to a lockdown-induced halt following its Nov 4th opening night. The good news is that Clint Dyer and Roy Williams' sequel to last winter's National entry, Death of England, was filmed at that decisive performance for tranmission in due course. The even better news is that the play, and co-author Dyer's direction of it, Read more ...