Race to the Bottom: Racialization and Proletarianization in the British Theatre of the Long (white) Nineties
Thank you to the University of Warwick’s Department of Theatre and Performance Studies for inviting me to present alongside Jaz Blackwell-Pal in a seminar called Theatre is Work/Work is Theatre yesterday. We had a great conversation and the excellent work that Jaz presented on emotional labour can be found here. My paper is below. This is very much ongoing work and I’m particularly grateful to Roaa Ali for her response about the need more substantially to theorise proletarianization as a racializing process here, which I am working on, but for the time being, here are my thoughts.
I want to persuade you that racialization is a social and economic process that is not reducible to identity. I want to suggest that it has been driven, in theatre production in Britain over the last thirty or so years, to a great extent by the delineation, organisation and remuneration of work. I’m not saying that racialization is determined by the operations of political economy, but that it is scaffolded by such processes, which set its limits. I also want to propose that we think of racialization conjuncturally: on historically specific terrain that is formed by the condensation of particular political and cultural forces and tendencies. Finally, I hope to give you some food for thought about the relations between anti-racism and anti-capitalism, because — as I see it — racialization and capital accumulation are locked together in a race to the bottom: an insistent process of producing and reproducing racialized hierarchies that serves, ultimately, to immiserate us all.
I’m going to start by explaining what I mean by racialization, move on to think about its relations with proletarianization, and conclude with a couple of examples of these relations from the conjuncture of the long nineties.
Racialization
Any work on race has to contend with the problem, famously elaborated by Karen and Barbara Fields as ‘racecraft’, of deliberate or inadvertent participation in lending credence to the fictions of race by either offering explanations of its historical development that serve to naturalise that process, or otherwise giving the idea of race ontological credence. We have to contend, in other words, with our ambivalent capacity to — in W.J.T. Mitchell’s term — ‘see through’ race: to encounter it both as a transparent fiction and as a means by which our vision is constantly mediated. Last week, I overheard a security guard’s radio message about two ‘suspicious’ young women in a shopping centre who were ‘eastern European’, and I knew simultaneously that a) there is no ‘eastern European’ phenotype, and b) I could probably guess which people he meant. As Stuart Hall said, ‘the body is a text. And we are all readers of it. […] We are readers of race’, and thus, in his wonderful formulation, ‘the biological, physiological, or genetic definition, having been shown out the front door, tends to sidle around the veranda and climb back in through the window’. This is why Hall advocates a discursive approach to race, which focuses not on differences between people, but the ‘ways in which these differences have been organized within [….] systems of meaning’. These are the processes of racialization, and the challenge of opposing oneself to ‘racecraft’ is thus double: to dismantle them where they are to be found, and to avoid the reproduction of them within our analysis.
The fact that our racializing security guard was very likely to have been racially minoritized himself, and was speaking of women who would in other contexts be described as ‘white’, indicates a further problem for analysis. Namely, race is not only discursively constructed, but demonstrates considerable discursive flexibility. Hall’s work offers us analytical principles with which to address this problem because he sees race not as a social construction as such (shout out to Alana Lentin and Barnor Hesse here too), but as a discursive construct, which is made available for use in the wider terrain of ideological struggle. As a discursive construct, therefore, race is both positional (being ‘eastern European’) only makes sense from or against the position of ‘western Europe’, for example) and an ‘open system’, which draws on other discourses. We saw this in 2016, when the shared discursive resources upon which the racialization of people as black or brown and ‘eastern European’ draws were exposed by increases in racialized attacks on all of these groups.
This shared experience of racialized hostility and violence also demonstrates that discourses are systems of meaning in which we can define a regularity. A racially minoritized security guard racializing two apparently white women as ‘eastern European’ does not, of course, mean that race is a fatally relativistic concept that will eventually be torn apart by its internal contradictions. Rather, it demonstrates that the regularity that can be defined within the concept of race is that of white supremacy as the position from which the ascription of racialized minority status ‘makes sense’, hence Alana Lentin’s definition of race as ‘a technology for the management of human difference, the main goal of which is the production, reproduction, and maintenance of white supremacy’. With this broader definition in mind, next we have to consider the ways in which, as Anamik Saha puts it, cultural commodities become racialized, paying close attention to the cultural industries and the material processes by which they produce cultural artefacts.
In the next two sections of this paper, I will first propose that the organisation of work — and particularly the proletarianization of theatre workers — is one crucial such mechanism, and then offer a brief account of how it functioned to racialize theatre production in the conjuncture of the long nineties.
Proletarianization
Proletarianization, the bringing of people into the wage relation such that their labour can be subsumed to capital accumulation, is — as Jodi Dean has observed — a ‘dynamic’– that ‘produces, uses up and discards […] workers’. To speak in very broad terms, the history of British theatre in the twentieth century offers two principal currents for this dynamic. First, the move — in the late-Victorian and Edwardian theatre — from actor-led managements that functioned as cottage industries, often managed by families, to larger theatre managements led by impresarios (we might think of Bronson Albery, Maurice Bandmann, H.M. Tennent) who were not actor managers, but entrepreneurs managing substantially larger theatres than their predecessors and able to take advantage of expanded colonial touring circuits. All of this meant a theatre with more workers, whose work was more comprehensively subsumed to the interests of capital accumulation. These workers were increasingly unlikely to share stages with amateurs, or have acquired their initial training in the amateur theatre. HB Tree’s expanding and professionalizing operation at the turn of the twentieth century led him to found an academy, the first dedicated British drama school, which would become RADA.
Tree and his fellow managers were, as Nicholas Hytner described himself a century later in 2009, ‘consumer[s]’ of drama school graduates. Hytner’s form of proletarianization, operated, however, within my second current, that of the subsidised theatre, a creation of post-war subsidy, which was characterised by an increasingly formalised infrastructure, initiated
in 1944, when Tyrone Guthrie produced a plan for the management of the Old Vic Theatre in discussion with officers of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), which was designed to function effectively as a kind of precondition for subsidy and established fundamental tenets of the sector’s policies into the twenty-first century. This current became hegemonic with Harold Wilson’s Labour government’s introduction of the country’s first bill for the arts in 1965. This formally instituted what had functioned more as a form of state patronage until then, and enabled the consolidation of an emergent national theatre sector, which was increasingly co-ordinated and professionalised, and dependent for its survival upon collaborative arrangements such as touring and co-production, with new technologies and buildings to manage, and staff moving between organisations. These factors produced increasingly homogenous practices, developed and shared by such sectoral organisations as the Association of British Theatre Technicians. Thus, repertory theatres — a descriptor rooted in their working practices — became regional theatres — a descriptor that positioned them in relation to the sector of which they were an increasingly integrated part. All of this produced ever more proletarianized workers, subjected to managerialist regimes co-ordinated by what sociologists Barbara and John Ehrenreich would later call the ‘professional-managerial class’ (PMC), a term they coined to describe middle-class technocrats who did not own or control the means of production, but sustained capitalist reproduction by administrative and managerial mediation between capitalists proper and their workers.
To return to racialization, in 1947 the British Guyanese actor Robert Adams, offered a clear-sighted critique of the ways in which theatre’s PMC produced a sector structured by the networks of whiteness and dedicated to its cultural values. He reflected that parts were ‘few and far between’ and constantly required him to embody a ‘Negro stereotype’. As a result, he developed a plan ‘of owning a theatre and having a Dramatic School’, but observed that ‘the task is such a big one and is meeting with such opposition that it is breaking my heart’. In the mid-1950s, the Jamaican-British director Yvonne Brewster was told, at Rose Bruford College, that although they would train her, ‘you’ll never work’.
In May 1975, the Guardian newspaper’s ‘London Letter’ column reported that it was the policy at Central for black students to study for only seven of the acting course’s nine terms because ‘there weren’t enough parts for blacks in the prestige productions mounted in the last two terms’. The theatre sector, in other words, was a white theatre from which racially minoritized people were functionally excluded from working. One consequence of this structural exclusion was that activist-artists of colour established systems to support and generate employment that paralleled the industry that refused to employ them. In 1956, Edric and Pearl Connor founded the Edric Connor Agency (later the Afro-Asian Caribbean Agency) to give representation to black performers. One of their clients was Carmen Munroe who co-founded Talawa Theatre Company in 1986, following in the wake of initiatives such as Tara Arts (founded 1977) and the Black Theatre Seasons (established by Anton Phillips at the Arts Theatre in 1983).
Just as this parallel theatre made by and for racially minoritized people was gathering pace in the 1980s, there was a further shift in the process of proletarianization with the shift — initiated in the late 1970s — to what David Harvey has termed ‘flexible [capital] accumulation’. Harvey shows that the mode of regulation that enabled this dramatic reshaping of socio-economic norms and practices was characterised by greater wage restraint, increased sub-contracting and outsourcing, and more casualisation and self-employment. It’s important to note that although this process did further intensify managerialism, it did not structurally benefit the PMC. Although managerial regimes can facilitate proletarianization, they do so from within its logics. We have therefore seen that, since this intensified subjection of workers to the power of capital, the PMC has deteriorated as a class as its members have found themselves increasingly subject to the logics of proletarianization that they were complicit in imposing upon others. We see this in the theatre too. The director Giles Havergal remarked in 1993 that — because of the intensified pressure on the Arts Council to both reduce and justify subsidies that ‘just as government funding on the arts is retracting, the paperwork and bureaucracy have been increased’. At the same time, cuts meant that specialist functions such as set and costume construction were increasingly outsourced or subcontracted; equipment was commonly hired to save the costs of maintenance and storage, and self-employed creative workers were contracted on minimal fees, limiting their available time on any given project. All of this will tend disproportionately to affect racially minoritized workers as a group, but — as Robbie Shilliam has recently argued — one of the paradoxes of this shift to flexible accumulation was that although racial discrimination remained in the employment market, it became more individualized and fractured.
The Long (white) Nineties
Shilliam’s argument — to which I cannot do justice here — serves to emphasise that both racialization and proletarianization are social and economic processes that are historically specific, complex, often contradictory, and overdetermined — which is to say not only that they have multiple causes but that in them the social structure and its effects are like two sides of a mobius strip, continually flowing into each other. Both therefore must be analysed in relation to a terrain that is, in Stuart Hall’s term, ‘conjunctural’, which describes the fact that ‘very dissimilar currents, some of a long duration, some of a relatively short duration, tend to fuse or condense at particular moments into a particular configuration’. Hall’s injunction is simply that we make ‘that configuration, with its balance of forces […] the object of [our] analysis’. The particular conjuncture at stake here is that of the long nineties — as Jeremy Gilbert and others have termed it — which I date from about 1992–2015. I am really happy to discuss how and why I use this term in questions, but for the time being I ask that you accept that it describes, at an analytically useful level, a period of superficially progressive technocratic neoliberal hegemony marked by more or less stultifying cultural stasis.
During this period, the theatre saw some integration of the parallel racially minoritized sector into the white theatre. In 1991, Mustapha Matura’s The Coup was staged at the NT, the first work by a Caribbean writer to be programmed there, following Jatinder Verma becoming the NT’s first director of colour with his 1990 production of Molière’s Tartuffe. The white theatre had realised that the time for exclusion was up. The in-roads made by Black-led companies, the emergence of a Black middle class concentrated mainly in urban centres where theatres were to be found, and what Stuart Hall termed the ‘multicultural drift’ whereby white hegemony began gradually to be eroded all established a new terrain for racialization in theatre production, typified by The Coup’s all-white creative team, which remained the norm for Black plays on white stages well into the twenty-first century.
This racialized division of labour, in which Black performers’ — and sometimes authors’ — work was commonly framed in productions principally by and for white people was memorably criticised in 2003 by Darcus Howe, who wrote that Roy Williams’ Fallout (directed by Ian Rickson and designed by Ultz at the Royal Court) staged Black pain for ‘the delectation of whites’. Similarly, with very few exceptions, Talawa was only able to mount Black-led plays (as opposed to Black-cast or Black-adapted white classics) by establishing a residency in London’s Cochrane Theatre, which ended in 1994.
When Paulette Randall took over Talawa and attempted to combine a Black-led programme with the creation of a permanent home for the company, she found it impossible. She resigned in May 2005, two months before the Arts Council withdrew funding for the proposed building because it had ‘lost faith in Talawa’s ability to deliver either the required £1.9m matching funding, or the management skills and artistic vision necessary to run a building’. Talawa’s current Artistic Director, Michael Buffong, chose to rebuild the company by programming predominantly Black-cast white plays alongside readings of new Black plays. This strategy has proved successful, and Talawa announced in 2019 that it would have a permanent home in Croydon’s redeveloped Fairfield Halls.
The assimilationist approach that created this situation became widespread during the 1990s, when it proved successful as a means of sustaining white supremacy in a sector that could not remain so overtly racist. I want to argue that it had its roots not so much in any commitment of New Labour to progressive politics, but to a deep ambivalence with respect to race that it in fact shared with Thatcher’s earlier neoliberal project. This continuity can be seen in the 1983 Conservative election campaign poster (below), of which Paul Gilroy wrote that ‘the slightly too large suit worn by the young man, with its unfashionable cut and connotations of a job interview […] coveys what is being asked of the black readers as the price of admission to the colour-blind form of citizenship promised by the text’. Gilroy explicitly notes that this man is expected to forsake any signifiers of cultural difference, but his associative reading of the image uncovers another layer of the poster’s tacit demand: the man must turn up ready for — and ready to compete for — work.
Both sides of this poster’s message were repeated in 2016 by Trevor Phillips, New Labour’s choice to head the Commission for Racial Equality, which became, under him, the now justly infamous Equalities and Human Rights Commission. In his pamphlet, Race and Faith: The Deafening Silence, Phillips writes that ‘Some minority groups remain unsuccessful in education and employment three generations on. […] This raises a difficult question to which we, unfortunately, do not know the answer. […] how much of their failure is caused by the door repeatedly being closed in their faces, and how much is due to the fact that they are handcuffed to heavy cultural baggage?’ Actually, we do know the answer. Maurizio Lazzarato has noted that the disciplining effect of employment — and particularly precarious employment — is fundamental to the neoliberal conception of markets as spaces of competition rather than trade, which are therefore characterised by inequality. That inequality can be seen, for example, in the fact that ‘periods of employment only compensate partially’ for the costs of sustaining oneself as a worker. The costs associated with this disjunctive condition are racializing. They favour those with structural advantages, and work to enforce norms of ideological self-regulation. We can therefore see that the managerial structuring and precarious conditions of theatre work in the long nineties offered a perfect opportunity for an enforceable bargain with the ideology of whiteness to be offered to racially minoritized workers: conditional access to employment in exchange for assimilation.
Futures?
Finally, a glance to the future. We find ourselves today at a conjunctural crisis that remains unresolved. The long nineties are long over but history has not yet decisively changed gears. The possibility of a project of anti-racism co-ordinated with anti-capitalism represented, for example, by the commitment of Black Lives Matter to Palestinian liberation has not yet been extinguished, but the forces ranged against it are formidable.
To return to the British theatre, we find that there is currently a strong tendency for anti-racist projects to be rooted in identity. Such projects assert the value of new, racially minoritized leadership, and they are not wholly wrong. Such initiatives can certainly be part of the solution to racialization. But, though necessary, they remain — according to my analysis — insufficient and offer what Stuart Hall might have described as a dangerous ‘guarantee’. Their possibilities remain scaffolded by a racializing-proletarianizing system, and, as I hope I have convinced you, that system cannot be dismantled either by anti-racism or anti-capitalism alone.
