Dear Performance Studies Network subscribers,

Please accept this friendly reminder that you are cordially invited to join Quorum for our final event of 2023, where we will be joined by Dr Tom Six for a talk titled: In Order of Appearance: Theatre and the Racial Regime.

Abstract

This paper will make two connected arguments about theatre and what Stuart Hall described as ‘that fatal coupling of difference and power’ known as race. The first is broad and theoretical, the second specific and historical. In a brief preface to his book Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, Cedric Robinson defined the concept of a ‘racial regime’ that underpins the remainder of his study of early American film. ‘Racial regimes are,’ he wrote, ‘constructed social systems in which race is proposed as a justification for the relations of power’. Such systems, Robinson argued, are antipathetic to history and to social relations, both of which threaten their ‘claims of naturalism’.

At a theoretical level, I will propose that theatre allows us to develop Robinson’s account of the constructed nature of racial regimes because race is crucially theatrical in its construction, since both technologies rely on the ordering of appearance. Theatre therefore offers an analytical standpoint from which to view the construction and maintenance of a racial regime, which I will propose is characterised by the twinned processes of abstraction and concretion. Most importantly, these dynamics enable us to identify tensions and contradictions within a racial regime and pinpoint moments at which it is prone to collapse, bringing into focus what Robinson described as the ‘chaotic’ process of its re/production.

The second part of the talk will offer examples of racial regimes in Britain viewed through the prism of the theatre. First, I will propose that the British theatre’s racial regime was characterised, until the late 1970s, by informal but near-total segregation. By that time, however, the twinned actions of ineluctable historical change and increasingly contested social relations forced a crisis that was not stabilised until the early 1990s. The new regime that then emerged was no longer defined simply by racialized segregation, but by ongoing structural oppression offset by conditional and internally stratified inclusion. In other words, the logic of racial difference became transmuted into the logic of the border. The inherent contradictions of this regime became increasingly obvious in the 2010s, and produced unignorable ruptures in 2020. Now, therefore, Britain’s racial regime finds itself in crisis once again, and this is clearly visible in the institution of the theatre. I hope, therefore, that we may conclude with some collective consideration of antiracist strategies to grasp the opportunity of this historical moment.

Tom Six is Reader in Politics and Performance at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, and an editor of the journal Studies in Theatre and Performance. His current research focuses on the politics of race in theatre and of planetary performance. He is the author (before 2023 as Tom Cornford) of numerous essays on theatre-making and its politics, and of Theatre Studios: A Political History of Ensemble Theatre-Making (Routledge 2021), as well as co-editor of Michael Chekhov in the Twenty-First Century: New Pathways (Bloomsbury 2020), and a special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review on director Katie Mitchell (2020).

https://www.tom6.space/

This hybrid event takes place in person at Queen Mary University of London’s Mile End campus in ArtsOne, RR2 and simultaneously online. If you want to join us, please book a free ticket. For those attending online, we will send you a Zoom link on the day of the event. For those joining in person, you are welcome in ArtsOne from 17:30.

The event kicks off promptly at 18:00 and wraps up around 19:00, when in-person attendees are cordially invited to stay and chat over drinks and nibbles.

Book tickets here:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/quorum-tom-six-tickets-757684744467

Find Quorum’s full list of upcoming events (next term announced soon!) at: https://quorumqmul.wordpress.com

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