Conference paper: Death of England, counterinsurgency, and the racial regime

It was a real pleasure to be part of a panel with Roaa Ali and Julian Meyrick at the Performance Studies International conference in London today.

Michael Balogun as Delroy in Death of England: Delroy at the National Theatre (2020). Photo by Normski.

My paper was about Clint Dyer and Roy Williams’ Death of England trilogy of plays and Cedric Robinson’s concept of the ‘racial regime’. Basically, my argument is that mainstream representations of racial diversity in British culture are constructed – under our current racial regime – as domestic counterinsurgency. In other words, they legitimate (sometimes directly, sometimes by ensuring they remain commensurate with) both racialized state violence and ethnonationalism. If you’re interested, you can read the paper here (I’m working on this for publication at the moment, so please don’t cite without permission).