Personhood Practice & Pedagogy in Black Womxn Theatre!

d'bi.young anitafrika Doctoral Researcher at London South Bank University, UK

Abstract

Personhood, Practice, & Pedagogy in Black Womxn Theatre: A Black Queer Transfeminist Dubography, is a critical autoethnography rooted in the Anitafrika Dub Praxis. This thesis investigates how I, and other members of the predominantly English-speaking African-Caribbean descended community of Black womyn theatre makers in Tkaronto, Northern Turtle Island, decoliberate (to enact liberation through decolonial action) personhood, practice, and pedagogy, within concentric kinship circles of femtorship. As a hybrid memoir-monograph created by an insider-dubographer, the dissertation: a) charts the hxrstory and development of  Black womyn’s theatre in Northern Turtle Island, b) investigates how colonial-hxstorical-systemic trauma affects Black womyn theatre practitioners, c) explores how Black womyn metabolise oppression through embodied playmaking, d) identifies feminist performance aesthetics in Black womxn theatre; and e) theorizes my original methodologies that formulate the Anitafrika Dub Praxis, as a Black, queer, transfeminist technology for the decolonisation of theatre training. 

This research emerges from my 25-year journey as a dub poet and theatre maker, drawing on qualitative and quantitative data that includes 41 semi-structured interviews with Black womyn theatre practitioners, an online survey, and archival materials, including Anita Stewart’s unpublished manuscript of collected writings and ahdri zhina mandiela’s 1995 documentary on/stage/black/women. Using Practice-as-Research, Black feminist epistemology, intersectionality and Ubuntu philosophy, I discuss how Black womyn theatre makers rupture colonial constructs of humxnity, catalyse radical paradigm shifts, and enact pedagogies of transformation through performance-based worldbuilding. The research shows how we conjure heterogeneous cultures of criticality, courage, and communion through our creativity, while also navigating the psycho-emotional and socio-political fissures within our concentric kinship circles. 

The PaR outcome of my PhD is an Anitafrika Method Resource Compendium for decolonizing theatre training, which includes a Decolonial Praxis Deck, seven Principle Talks, and an Anitafrika Method Video Workshop Series and Booklet. My original contribution to knowledge is the Anitafrika Dub Praxis, a decolonial system comprising the Anitafrika Method, Critical Dub Pedagogy, and Dubography—three components that interweave methodology, pedagogy, and performance. By theorizing Black womyn’s theatre, I offer transformative models of decolonial cultural stewardship, epistemic liberation, and living archival practice. This PhD affirms that Black womyn’s theatre is a play-space where “I am because you are because we are.” Ubuntu

Dub Riddim by KennyMuziq