2019, Vol.32, No.3

Journal of Modern English Drama 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.11

pISSN : 1226-3397
https://journal.kci.go.kr/medak

Caryl Churchill’s Far Away dramatizes an apocalyptic war of all against all in which all the creatures on the Earth fight each other, and is thus considered a trenchant response to the atrocities and wars we witnessed at the turn of the millennium. A committed political playwright, Churchill critiques modernity’s discourse of exclusion and progress as a force driving the human species to its irrevocable self-annihilation. In doing so, she focuses, echoing the recent ethical turn, on the question of ‘What should we do.’ This essay explores the theme of response ethics, especially with regard to the characters’ indifference, or lack of response, to the suffering of the other, which leads to the holocaust and, ultimately, to the destruction of the world. Joan, the main character inculcated with modernity’s value of justice, becomes complicit in state violence when she turns a blind eye to what she witnesses. She shuns the responsibility of “witnessing” because she does not realize that as an embodied vulnerable being, she is already interconnected with, and open to, the world, but her failure to respond to the address of the other takes its toll on the entire world in an ironic way, causing the devastation of nature and the extinction of the humanity. Churchill’s fable-like narrative delivers a warning that we humans are ethically responsible for all the living beings, both human and nonhuman, as well as for our home, the Earth.

This paper explores the dilemmas of forging alternative Black British identities in Kwame Kwei-Armah’s 2003 play, Elmina’s Kitchen. Kwei-Armah, the established Black British playwright, presents the intergenerational differences in the community of Afro-Caribbean immigrants in London, encouraging the audience to examine the dilemmas involved in creating a sustainable community within the mainstream white society. Elmina’s Kitchen centres on the predicament of Deli, a reformed ex-con who tries in vain to stop Ashley, his rebellious son, from joining a local gang. The final scene finds him helplessly watching Ashley being killed in the gang warfare. Ashley’s murder is avoidable, and the play is intended as a serious warning to young black males drawn rapidly into the inner-city black-on-black crime. However, the play moves beyond its moral framework as Deli’s dilemma comes to the foreground. As a second-generation immigrant, Deli swerves away from the established stereotype of ‘irresponsible’ and ‘deviant’ black fathers, challenging the mainstream audience’s prejudice against Black Britons. He is the only character that aspires to instill a positive sense of black identity for the third-generation black youth. He has to re-define ‘blackness’ as well as to combat political and economic impotence, the negative legacy of the first-generation. Without the benefit of African cultural heritage and rejecting the ‘rube boy’ culture, the Caribbean subculture based on repressive black masculinity, he sometimes comes close to internalizing the idealized white norms and values. Deli’s failure to save Ashley is both personal and generational. It demonstrates a dilemma associated with the situation of the second-generation immigrants forging viable black identities in the poverty of the mainstream black culture.

Anthropocene is an ideology that seeks to escape the indiscriminate abuse of human power and selfish humanism by the development of capitalism, imperialism, and science and technology. In particular, William Shakespeare’s last work, The Tempest, reveals the deepest insights into life and shows the various aspects of Anthropocene reading such as climate, nature, humans, politics, and a new generation. In other words, Shakespeare seems to have pondered how he can unleash his imagination about the political turmoil of the time, various climate change and moral issues. This is why many Anthropocene scholars are interested in Shakespeare's play again and this is where his work reflects human beings who are suffering from environmental pollution and natural disasters. That is, Shakespeare is urging modern people to feel responsible and desperate to escape from selfish humanism, becoming the subject of geological agent with historical consciouness.