Identity and Consensus in 1951 Festival of Britain & Unboxed Festival 2022

The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, is a conservatoire and centre of study and research in drama, theatre and performance.

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Dr Mader McGuinness examines aspects of the representation of British identities both in the Festival of Britain 1951 and Unboxed 2022.

Royal Central School of Speech and Drama

This paper, by Dr Caoimhe Mader McGuinness, will examine and compare aspects of the representation of British identities both in the Festival of Britain and Unboxed – identities understood in relationship to the British territory itself as well in their relationship to (former) colonised countries and the European continent. Both projects were conceived by governments seeking to make bold political statements in moments of national crisis and renewal: the Labour government’s post-war reconstruction in the case of the Festival of Britain and the Conservative driven exit from the European Union in the case of Unboxed. Even as the ideological projects underpinning these temporally distanced governments might be seen as fundamentally opposed – the first popularly characterised by the expansion of social democratic welfare and state ownership and the second by an ongoing encroachment of private interests in formerly nationalised domains such as healthcare and education – many aspects of both projects’ negotiation of British identities appear surprisingly similar. Despite very different approaches to the festival model in relationship to the organisation of exhibits and events, both projects are characterised in the first instance by the necessity of political compromise regarding the achievements they originally were understood to champion, here Labour’s achievements in general and the Conservative exit from the European Union in particular. However it is more specifically in how their evocations of Britain’s place in the world (and cosmos!), imperial history and British racialised identities are evoked which renders both projects not only surprisingly adjacent in substance but also perhaps more broadly indicative of how questions of race and empire can be consensually harnessed in large cultural undertakings by disparate British governments. I will be drawing on archives and critical work on the festival of Britain by Becky Conekin and Richard Hornsey as well as recent and less recent work on race, identity, consensus and antiracism in British cultural and literary studies. This will help me to illuminate how both festivals present participants with curated silences and flattened conceptions of diversity deeply enmeshed with discourses on identity characteristic of certain forms of liberal consensus at a broader social level of which these silences and flattened conceptions of identities also form an integral part. BiographyDr Caoimhe Mader McGuinness is a senior Lecturer in Drama at Kingston. Her research and publications look at the politics of reception (spectatorship, criticism and institutional identities) of contemporary theatre and live art through a Marxist, feminist, queer and post-colonial lens. She broadly focuses on the specific histories of Western imperialism and its liberal afterlives as these apply to theatrical production and reception in contemporary Britain and France. Further interests are social reproduction in feminist performance, the 1951 Festival of Britain and Marxist approaches to theatre and performance. She has been published in Contemporary Theatre Review, Performance Research and the edited collection Rancière and Performance. She is also the senior books review editor for Theatre Research International.A drinks reception will follow the seminar.
P﻿hoto credit: Bernard William Lee

Identity and Consensus in 1951 Festival of Britain & Unboxed Festival 2022

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Identity and Consensus in 1951 Festival of Britain & Unboxed Festival 2022

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