ABSTRACT
Sentiments similar to Homi Bhabha’s argument about the didactic role of history’s most marginalized actors inspired my choice of England’s Alternative Theatres as a field of graduate study. Not all my benefactors at the British Council, however, shared my perspective on the cultural practices of the dispossessed. Back in the days of my doctoral work in Bristol, at a reception organized by the Council for scholars from the Commonwealth, an eighty-year-old woman who had spent much of her adult life as a nurse and schoolteacher in colonial Africa asked me skeptically, “how useful do you think your study in England will be to your country?” Her question was perfectly understandable, for amid a roomful of fellows specializing in medicine and the physical sciences, I alone had elected to study something as seemingly impractical and esoteric as “Alternative and Fringe Theatres and the Cultural History of Post-World War II England.” I explained that I was on a quest to investigate not only anticolonial resistance in Nigeria, but also its manifestations in the cultural works of radical theatre groups within an increasingly post-colonial England. My questioner was horrified. “Good God!” she exclaimed: “You mean Her Majesty’s government pays you to study those monsters, deviants and Caribbean darkies who make England so inglorious?”
