This thesis examines post-war black British theatre through a transnational lens. It argues that the hitherto prioritization of a national paradigm in discussions of black British theatre is not sufficiently complex to chart the historical processes that have shaped it and the multiple spatial, cultural, and political contexts in which it has been generated. This thesis finds that a transnational optic exposes a network of connections – physical, ideological and psychic – between blacks in Britain and other global black communities which have shaped and transformed the lives of Britain’s black communities and their cultural production. The thesis is divided into three chapters: the USA (chapter 1), the Caribbean (chapter 2), and Africa (chapter 3). Each chapter represents a specific geo-cultural-political space with which black British theatre has an important relationship. Each chapter follows the same broad structure: the first half of the chapter establishes a particular transnational process and mode of analysis which frames the ensuing historical discussion; the second half is devoted to an analysis of two contemporary black British dramatists. The USA chapter examines black British theatre through the lens of Americanization and Black Power. The first half traces the influence of black America on black British theatre’s formation, organization and expression in the post-war period. The second half examines works by Kwame Kwei-Armah and Mojisola Adebayo. The Caribbean chapter applies the process and theory of creolization to a discussion of the rise and consolidation of Caribbean culture in black British theatre. The chosen case studies for this chapter are Roy Williams and Bola Agbaje. Finally, the African chapter discusses the recent flux of immigrants from Africa since the 1990s and, using the concept of diaspora as an analytic model, explores the impact this has had on black British theatre. The second half focuses on works by Inua Ellams and debbie tucker green. Dividing the thesis into the spaces of the USA, the Caribbean and Africa allows one to filter and track the origination and circulations of particular sets of ideas, practices and / or people. The divisions reiterate that I am looking at complex heterogeneous material informed by multiple strands of influence. Nevertheless, connections between the chapters emerge, which illustrate historically embedded circuits of influence and exchange that have routinely transgressed national borders. Taken as a whole, the thesis supports the idea that black British theatre not only merits a transnational approach, but is, in fact, a transnational practice in itself.

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Present research addresses the topic of construction immigrant identities in two novels, White Teeth and Swing Time by contemporary British author Zadie Smith. The main focus of the work is to look closely at the examples of the characters in the aforementioned two novels who are first and second generation immigrants and see how they negotiate and create their identity formations. The most valuable theoretical framework for the present research proves to be the hybrid identity theory created by Homi Bhabha. Thus, the first theoretical part of the thesis attempts to explain the theoretical framework in order to apply the notion to the literary examples from the novels that are addressed in the following two chapters of the thesis. The following analysis of the literary characters revealed that the identity formations are primarily constructed through negotiation and hybridization as the immigrant identities tend to be hybrids of the cultures of their ancestors. Additionally, the penultimate chapter addresses the ideas of cross-national cosmopolitanism that are mentioned in the second novel which seem to be the possible and desired outcome of the processes of hybridization, while also exploring the limits of the theory.

<p>The US Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was an organization of the Black Power Movement, a cultural and a political nationalist movement central to the history of the African-American Freedom Struggle. The Black Panthers' anti-imperialist politics, militant visual style, grassroots strategies, and community programs appealed within and beyond the United States. Between 1967 and 1972, people of color struggling under class and ethnic oppression in six countries outside the United States formed Black Panther Parties inspired by the US Panthers. In the United Kingdom, West Indians, West Africans, and South Asians formed a Black Panther Movement in 1968 and in Israel, a group of Mizrahi (Arab) Jews founded a Black Panther Party in in Jerusalem in 1971. This dissertation examines these two movements with reference to the US Black Panthers in order to place local, national, and global histories in dialogue. </p><p>This study adopts a transnational framework that conceives of Black Power as a movement of global migrants. From 1948 to 1967, over two million people from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean migrated to the UK and Israel. These migrants' overlapping experiences of displacement and class- and ethnic-based oppression led them to establish Black Panther groups in their new home countries in order to raise their political concerns under a collective banner. These people chose to become Black Panthers specifically because the US Black Panther Party offered a name and style that connected their global brothers and sisters to a range of grassroots strategies promoting interethnic solidarity and the collective advancement of black communities against the social structures that fostered racism. Through the examination of oral histories, photographs, letters, fliers, passport stamps, films, court cases, and surveillance files, this study focuses on how these global Panther activists represented themselves and their politics in the public sphere.</p><p>Both the British and Israeli Panther movements first organized in response to the city police's harassment of youth in their neighborhoods. Their respective critiques expanded from an opposition to police brutality to systemic goals of improving housing, education, welfare, and employment for blacks. Both of the nation-states in which these groups emerged relied upon the US for military stability and economic support during this period, such that the British and Israeli Panthers saw confrontations with their respective governments as acts of resistance to American Empire.</p><p>This dissertation, then, is at once a community study of two branches of a transnational social movement as well as a larger story. The broader narrative reveals how everyday people responded to the American Empire in the 1960s and 1970s, how the US Black Panthers translated black internationalist politics into urban neighborhoods, and how people outside the US constructed narratives about African-Americans as a way of making sense of racial formations at home. This work also demonstrates how foreign governments and media producers appropriated African-American history for a variety of in political purposes during this period. This examination enables a deeper understanding of the transnational black freedom struggle, as it centers the role that people of color outside the United States played in creating and sustaining Black Panther Movements that confronted American and British Empires from the grassroots.</p> / Dissertation

In recent years, attention on Black British history has increased in light of the 2020 resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement that encouraged Britons to rethink their participation in suppressing racialised communities. Much of this literature fills the gaps that have long existed in the British historical canon that overlook Black Briton’s and their existence in Britain entirely. This thesis seeks to contribute to this work through analysing the remarkable role of Black British bookshops and how they functioned as political, cultural, social, and imaginative spaces between the inauguration of the first Black bookshop in 1966 and the last International Book Fair of Radical, Black and Third World Books in 1995. Jürgen Habermas’s theory of public space is used and reframed to discuss the necessity of public space for marginalised communities in democratic societies. This is seen through the multifunctional aspects of bookselling space and the testimonies of bookshop owners and users who attest to the bookshop’s significance. Whilst the political importance of the Black British bookshop space has previously been emphasised, this thesis shows that their cultural, social and imaginative functions were also important aspects that drastically impacted the lives of Black Britons in the post-war era.

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This study examines how in the context of international migration, ethnic (cultural) assimilation may influence fertility and attitudes towards fertility. The relationships between ethnic assimilation (measured by the extent to which immigrants will have subscribed to the core values of Canadian society through life style or behaviourial characteristics and social networks), socioeconomic status (that is, level of education and income), and six variables used to measure fertility and attitudes towards fertility of Black African immigrant women in Canada are examined. These include: ideal number of children; ideal number of Sons; currently preventing pregnancy; currently pregnant or trying to get pregnant; children ever born still living and more sons than daughters. The African women who participated in the study were all immigrants in Canada, selected from the different African communities. Only women in their child bearing years were selected. An attempt was made to include women from all the different categories of immigrants. Africans that were not black and blacks from North America and the Caribbean were excluded from the sample. Data collection for the study was at the micro-level. In total, 165 questionnaires, consisting of structured questions were handed out. Results revealed statistically significant relationships between ethnic assimilation and fertility and attitudes towards fertility. For example, a significant relationship existed between attending African dances, parties and informal social affairs, and currently preventing pregnancy, and pregnant or trying to get pregnant. A significant negative correlation was found between income and children ever born that were still living. Age too was found to be related to fertility, with women in the older age—group (35-44) reporting higher averages for ideal number of children and sons, as opposed to those in the younger age—groups and the entire population. Surprisingly enough, no significant relationships were recorded between level of education, feeling of ethnicity, maintenance of contact with homeland, years spent in Canada, residence in Africa, the category immigrants belonged to, and fertility as originally anticipated.

This study examines how in the context of international migration, ethnic (cultural) assimilation may influence fertility and attitudes towards fertility. The relationships between ethnic assimilation (measured by the extent to which immigrants will have subscribed to the core values of Canadian society through life style or behaviourial characteristics and social networks), socioeconomic status (that is, level of education and income), and six variables used to measure fertility and attitudes towards fertility of Black African immigrant women in Canada are examined. These include: ideal number of children; ideal number of Sons; currently preventing pregnancy; currently pregnant or trying to get pregnant; children ever born still living and more sons than daughters. The African women who participated in the study were all immigrants in Canada, selected from the different African communities. Only women in their child bearing years were selected. An attempt was made to include women from all the different categories of immigrants. Africans that were not black and blacks from North America and the Caribbean were excluded from the sample. Data collection for the study was at the micro-level. In total, 165 questionnaires, consisting of structured questions were handed out. Results revealed statistically significant relationships between ethnic assimilation and fertility and attitudes towards fertility. For example, a significant relationship existed between attending African dances, parties and informal social affairs, and currently preventing pregnancy, and pregnant or trying to get pregnant. A significant negative correlation was found between income and children ever born that were still living. Age too was found to be related to fertility, with women in the older age—group (35-44) reporting higher averages for ideal number of children and sons, as opposed to those in the younger age—groups and the entire population. Surprisingly enough, no significant relationships were recorded between level of education, feeling of ethnicity, maintenance of contact with homeland, years spent in Canada, residence in Africa, the category immigrants belonged to, and fertility as originally anticipated. / Arts, Faculty of / Sociology, Department of / Graduate

There is a noticeable absence of studies reflecting the personal views and experiences of black British African Caribbean (BBAC) people as students and clinical participants in UK nursing careers. Previous research about their nursing career choices has always been reported as part of other mixed BME cohorts and migrant groups. Indications in the literature suggest that they were being actively discouraged by their families from choosing nursing as a career, because of their parents’ and grandparents’ negative experiences as migrant workers in the NHS, leading to very low or non-participation in the profession. This study set out to address this gap by giving them a distinct voice, independent of other cohorts. It explored the factors which influence their decision and their experiences, throughout a variety of life stages, from school through to university and into clinical practice. This was to identify whether the findings from earlier research are still relevant from their perspectives rather than that of their parents. Participants and schools in the study were recruited by purposive sampling, and data was collected in three phases, a pilot study phase, a survey phase and an interview phase. A quantitative and qualitative interpretive approach were adopted underpinned by a mixed methods design. Descriptive statistical analysis of the survey and qualitative content analysis (QCA) of the interview transcripts were utilised to enable interrogation of the data. Findings are discussed within the context of available empirical evidence, related policy perspectives and theoretical underpinnings. Four main themes emerged from the study, as specific influencing factors on their experiences. These are: careers advice and choice for nursing, support, discrimination/racism and personal resilience. The findings reveal that BBAC people receive little or no careers advice about nursing at any of their life stages. Consequently, they make uninformed decisions about modern nursing careers, leaving a gap in their knowledge. However, they are not discouraged from choosing nursing as a career, by their families. When they choose a nursing career, they are fully supported and encouraged by their parents and families, in order to survive as students and clinical practitioners. However, institutional support as students and practitioners is weak and very poor. Despite this, they do not intend to actively discourage their own children from making nursing a career choice. Racism, discrimination and racialisation remain core factors influencing their social, educational and other lived experiences, despite numerous equality legislation and implementation. These have a continuous negative impact on them as visible minority students and practitioners in the NHS. They respond to these negative experiences by developing personal resilience aided by strong social and cultural support provided by their families and community. These findings make a unique contribution to the knowledge base by giving BBAC participants their own distinct voice. This was achieved through listening to them at varied points in their life stages, from school through to university and as eventual professionals in nursing. This is important new knowledge, which has ensured a clear recognition of their personal perspectives, in their own voices. These insightful new observations are necessary to build a specific knowledge base about them and are very positive for future participation of BBAC people in nursing careers and the NHS. An adapted model for inclusive participation is proposed, based on the findings of the research.