IIn 1988, the late Ghanaian writer and filmmaker Kwesi Owusu edited Storms of the Heart: An Anthology of Black Arts and Culture, a collection of writings and images by black artists in Britain, including Ben Okri on Shakespeare, Shobhana Jayasinghe on Indian dance theatre, Jacob Ross on decolonizing language, an interview with Ntozek Shange, and early pieces by the artist Sonia Boyce. Its aim was to document the progress made in black expatriate arts in post-war Britain, to give voice to the creative and political concerns of practitioners and, importantly, to push back against routine ghettoization and marginalization of their work. As a young writer exposed to such realities, this was a huge inspiration for me.
Courtea Newland’s essay collection The Art of Opposition is entirely her own work, but has a similar impact, primarily due to its provision of a space for black or “other” creators to feel supported and understood in their endeavors and to counterbalance mainstream pressures. Novelist, screenwriter and playwright, Newland himself is not immune to these pressures, his work sometimes subject to the disapproval of an industry that expects writers to meet commercial imperatives. In these scholarly, sharp, and clear-minded essays, he draws on his considerable experience and cultural knowledge to emphasize the “larger goal of saying what we want to say.”
Newland found early success with his first film, The Scholar, the story of two cousins caught up in drug violence in a west-London council estate. His serious brand of “urban” fiction was better received by the publishing world than the experimental, African-centric science fiction he was keen to write (a recent example is his 2021 novel A River Called Time), and he constantly found himself working in opposition to mainstream demand. In the essay Unseen Object/Observed Subject, he reflects on the criticism leveled at the successful TV drama Top Boy – that it was a “Rodman drama” or “trauma porn”, and played into negative black stereotypes. This was a complaint similarly made about his own work, and his stance is that – regardless of the expectations or preferences of others – the truthfulness of a depiction should be paramount. He recalls a prisoner meeting a writer in Wandsworth prison, saying: “Please never stop writing about us” – “a pledge I have kept ever since”.
“Artists of color constantly attack the way we think and feel and refuse to care about what others think of us, or what they need from our art.” For them” he writes, and emphasizes the importance of the work of black artists being reviewed by critics who have an understanding of “where our cultural expressions come from, who we are.” Such insight is visible throughout the book, which is always quietly measured in anger, symbolizing a kind of rallying, defensive call for cultural agency that bypasses the gatekeepers. “The challenge is to see ourselves as fully human … on our own. To manage depictions of.”
The collection is divided into four sections, containing an impressive range of literary and cultural criticism: there is an essay of praise for Percival Everett, whom Newland refers to for his support of experimentation in the face of racial reductionism (“Everett was a writer ignored by the industry because he was not considered black enough. I am a writer who finds myself ignored by the industry because my work is too black”); Another on British rapper and producer Roots Manuwa, in which Newland proves himself to be a good music critic; and a piece in which he decries the persistent failure to include writers of color around working-class literature, despite the black British working class having existed since the 16th century. The essays are consistent, thoroughly informative, born from a keen awareness of black art and culture, whether it’s the relationship between dub and science fiction, the intersection between Afrofuturism and African futurism, or electro’s obsession with outer space. It’s also satisfying to read about the craft and trials of writing, although Newland always imbues these with a sense of devotion and positivity.
At a time when the arts are under attack, and when political progressivism has been demonized by the right as “wokeism”, this collection feels sorely needed. It is interesting to note that between the publication of Owusu’s Storms of the Heart and Newland’s The Art of Opposition, the term “Black” has been decapitalized and recapitalized, according to the painful ups and downs of the struggle for permanent racial equality. Bold, eloquent and passionate, Newland does not shy away from the artist’s role as a force of change and protest. “Whenever hate-driven mainstream culture grows, the counterculture often takes its rightful place as a place of protest.” It is a work of substance and integrity that would go down as one of his best works.
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