‘All is not how it appears to the naked eye’: Creative Agency and Staging Blackness in Contemporary British and Australian Dramatic Literature

This paper considers the tension and differences between cultural assertions of Indigenous identity and indigeneity in two vastly distinct but connected contexts of Britain and Australia that trouble clear-cut trajectories of transcultural translation. The work of two playwrights which centralises fostered children’s experiences, Jane Harrison’s Stolen and Mojisola Adebayo’s Mohammad Ali and Me problematizes the process of transcultural performability. The meeting point between them is the assertion of indigeneity in the face of the skin-deep readings of perceived racial identity which, in both national spaces privileges whiteness. In Australia, the term Indigenous acknowledges one’s Aboriginality, a social category (proven by a certificate if the following criteria are met: being of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent, identifying as an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, being accepted as such by the community in which you live, or formally lived). For black people born in Britain, the paperwork of a passport and birth certificate does not necessarily confirm the sense of one’s indigenousness which is far from automatically included in narratives of national identity and belonging, as Adebayo describes it, ‘The experience of being black in Britain is a microcosm of homelessness, of being displaced, estranged, a foreigner in your own country.