black culture
Origin review - bursts of brilliance in an unwieldy frameFriday, 08 March 2024
Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, about the key role caste systems play in subjugating whole racial groups, was a runaway success in the US in 2020. Here, the Pultizer-Prize winning black journalist is not so well... Read more... |
Shifters, Bush Theatre review - love will tear us apart againTuesday, 27 February 2024
For the past ten years, Black-British playwrights have been in the vanguard of innovation in the form and content of new writing. I’m thinking not only of writers with longer careers such as Roy Williams and debbie tucker green, but also of Inua... Read more... |
Entangled Pasts 1768-now, Royal Academy review - an institution exploring its racist pastTuesday, 06 February 2024
In Titian’s painting Diana and Actaeon,1559, a cluster of naked beauties bathes beside a stream. Scarcely visible in the right hand corner is a black woman helping the goddess hide her nudity from Acteon who has stumbled into her private glade. The... Read more... |
Albums of the Year 2023: Janelle Monáe - The Age of PleasureMonday, 18 December 2023
It was a year of bleak and brutal conflict, ugly and stupid imposition of power, overt Fascism in the mainstream public sphere, decay of infrastructure and apocalyptic weather. So what better than a record of total pleasure? And Janelle Monáe’s... Read more... |
Dreaming and Drowning, Bush Theatre - dense and intense monologue about Black queer identityTuesday, 05 December 2023
Kwame Owusu’s 55-minute one-hander does just what it says on the tin: it features a young student who dreams he is drowning. But its brevity is no bar to its being a dense and intense experience, worthy winner of last year’s Mustapha Matura Award.... Read more... |
Rustin review - a doubly liberated American lifeSunday, 05 November 2023
This is a tribute to a forgotten hero, gay black Quaker Bayard Rustin (Colman Domingo), driving force behind the 1963 March on Washington, the vast peaceful protest that sanctified Martin Luther King as his oratory seemed to lift black America... Read more... |
Death of England: Closing Time, National Theatre review - thrillingly and abundantly aliveTuesday, 10 October 2023
It’s closing time somewhere in the East End. Nah, not the pub, but at a small local shop. Inside, Denise is banging around with some big pans, while Carly is packing up the flowers. Their business is coming to an end and they are about to hand over... Read more... |
'The people behind the postcards': an interview with Priya Hein, author of 'Riambel'Tuesday, 03 October 2023
Priya Hein’s debut novel, Riambel, is an excoriating examination of Mauritius’ socio-political structures and the colonial past from which they have sprung. Centred around Noemi, a young Mauritian girl who lives in the novel’s titular village slum... Read more... |
Ailey 2, Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury review - young, black and fabulousWednesday, 27 September 2023
Dance lovers with no access to a major city could feel genuinely hard done by were it not for Dance Consortium. This sainted organisation works to bring a company from overseas each autumn to a dozen or so large-scale theatres across the UK and... Read more... |
Mlima's Tale, Kiln Theatre review - simple, powerful tale about the rape of AfricaSaturday, 23 September 2023
The work of the double Pulitzer-winning Black American dramatist Lynn Nottage has thankfully become a fixture in the UK. After its award-winning production of Sweat, the Donmar will stage the UK premiere of her Clyde’s next month, and MJ the... Read more... |
Album: Burna Boy - I Told Them...Friday, 01 September 2023
There’s been a lot of flak flying around this album already. It’s mainly been triggered by Burna Boy’s public activities which have included disparaging the wider Afrobeats music scene of West Africa, and some somewhat overcooked expressions of his... Read more... |
Prom 7: Urioste, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Otaka review – old friends, new worldsThursday, 20 July 2023
A full house, and television cameras: rarer events at the Proms than they used to be (or should be). Both lent a sense of occasion to the BBC National Orchestra of Wales’s visit to the Royal Albert Hall with their Conductor Laureate, Tadaaki Otaka.... Read more... |
