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 herstory 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 womyn’s theatre; and e) theorizes my original methodologies that formulate the Anitafrika Dub Praxis, as a Black, queer, transfeminist technology for decolonial theatre training. 

This research emerges from my twenty-five-year journey as a dub poet and theatre maker, drawing on qualitative and quantitative data that includes forty-one 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interviews with Black womyn theatre practitioners, an online survey, and archival materials, including Anita Stewart’s unpublished manuscript of collected writings and ahdri zhina mandiela’s 1995 documentary on/stage/black/women.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 use theatre to rupture colonial constructs of humanity, catalyse radical paradigm shifts, and enact pedagogies of transformation through performance-based worldbuilding. The research shows how we conjure heterogeneous cultures of criticality through our creativity, while also navigating psycho-emotional and socio-political fissures within our concentric kinship circles. 

The PaR outcome of my PhD is an Anitafrika Method Resource Compendium for decolonial theatre training, which includes a Decolonial Praxis Deck, seven Principle Lectures, and an Anitafrika Method Workshop video series. My original contribution to knowledge is the Anitafrika Dub Praxis, a decolonial system comprising the Anitafrika Method, Critical Dub Pedagogy, and Dubography, which are three components that interweave methodology, pedagogy, and performance. By theorising Black womyn’s theatre, I offer transformative models of decolonial cultural stewardship through living archival practice that inform Black womyn’s epistemic liberation. Black womyn’s theatre is a sacred  play-space that embodies Ubuntu: “I am because you are because we are.”

Dub Riddim by KennyMuziq