‘The Beast That Lies Dormant in the Belly of Our Country’: Race, Nation and Belonging

Focusing on a number of recent interventions, this chapter explores how migrants and descendants of migrants experience their uneasy relation to the nation, citizenship and belonging. It addresses plays that explore the consequences emerging from the legacies of the British Empire and slavery that serve to cast black citizens as inferior disruptive presences to be feared and contained. It also engages with the ways that theatre-makers have tackled what it means to be black in the contemporary Brexit-fuelled moment. As such, it considers how a number of playwrights articulate and tease out the complexities and complications of multiculturalism, call out endemic white privilege, the denigration of black subjectivities and confront the increasing tolerance of a far-right anti-immigrant rhetoric in twenty-first century Britain.