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‘Hearing Voices’ and Performing the Mind in debbie tucker green’s Dramatic-Poetics

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Abstract

This chapter explores tucker green’s unique dramatic idiom through her distinctive play ‘text’ which produces opportunities for audiences and readers to relish the ways in which language can be sounded—as it is seen, heard and uttered. Framed by Charles Bernstein’s distinctions between orality and aurality, the chapter examines tucker green’s techniques (employed in dirty butterfly [2003], stoning mary [2005] and nut [2013]) for making the mind physically (en)actable through her non-naturalistic methods for staging characters’ thoughts. The chapter emphasizes the influences of post-war Caribbean poetic heritage and the ongoing after-shock of colonization as being crucial to conceptions of contemporary British culture, and asserts the ‘right to opacity’ (Glissant 1997) as a counter-stance to the hegemonic critical and aesthetic frameworks that are habitually applied to black British writers and their writing.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK

    Deirdre Osborne

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  1. Deirdre Osborne
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Correspondence to Deirdre Osborne .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK

    Siân Adiseshiah

  2. School of Fine and Performing Arts, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK

    Jacqueline Bolton

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Osborne, D. (2020). ‘Hearing Voices’ and Performing the Mind in debbie tucker green’s Dramatic-Poetics. In: Adiseshiah, S., Bolton, J. (eds) debbie tucker green. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34581-5_12

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