Bella Enahoro (CSSD) - 2024-25 Students
bella.enahoro@cssd.ac.uk

Mediating Whiteness: Racialisation in the works of British playwrights, 1976–2020

This project interrogates ‘white’ as a racial category by analyzing constructions and critiques of whiteness in contemporary British playwriting. It interrogates whiteness as a central and silent referent which dominates narratives, distorts and imbalances histories, marginalises communities and fuels social inequalities. Dismantling whiteness, allows for wider understandings of nuanced social realities, not just as whiteness imagines it, which becomes part of dismantling the machinery of social inequalities and further provides a cultural methodology. By bringing together social history and the analysis of plays and playwriting, this thesis interrogates how British playwriting instantiates, reproduces, contests or dismantles whiteness as an apparatus of power, discipline and governance.

Co-Supervisors: Professor Maria Delgado & Professor Winsome Pinnock