This chapter examines the pinnacles of Black British theatre from the 1950s to the 2020s. It attempts to reconstruct the historiography of Black British theatre in a way that emphasises Black practitioners who wielded agency in hostile environments and contributed to reconfiguring what it means to work in British theatre. It builds on existing scholarship that acknowledges the social, political, and economic issues faced by the theatre industry to offer an analysis of how issues of belonging and nation are reflected in work produced. It traces the key historical trajectories of Black British theatre over three generations organised by similar concerns rather than time periods. It begins exploring the first generation of Black playwrights and the impact of the written play text. Its examination of the second generation acknowledges the development of Black theatre companies in the 1980s, focusing on the role state subsidy played in these companies’ deeply uneven longevity. Lastly, its focus on the third generation explores the structural changes pursued by Black makers, performers, directors, designers, producers, and audiences that demand that we renegotiate what is invoked by ‘Black British theatre’.

In Chapter 9, we turn to consider the interviews we conducted with some of the parents of the couples. Some of these parents were already grandparents many times over, and some were looking forward to becoming grandparents for the first time. In focusing on these interviews, we explore three different aspects. The first relates to whether or not the arrival of a grandchild might change the relationship with an adult child. The second explores the role that grandparents or intending grandparents expected to play in the lives of their adult children and grandchildren. And third, we look at whether or not the arrival of a grandchild changed how the participants viewed themselves. What we see is a marked difference between new parenthood and new grandparenthood. The former is marked by normative assumptions and social restrictions, while the latter appears to accord greater agency in terms of making decisions about what it means to be a grandparent.

Part V explores how Batswana manage interdependencies and distinctions between kinship and politics on local, national, and transnational levels. It takes in three major events: in Chapter 13, a family party; in Chapter 14, a homecoming celebration for the first age regiment to be initiated in a generation; and in Chapter 15, an opening event held by a respected national NGO. Chapter 13 argues that family celebrations are catalysts for conflict, performing familial success and distinguishing home from village by demonstrating an ability to manage dikgang. In Chapter 14, families prove pivotal to regenerating the morafe (tribal polity), and initiation proves pivotal in re-embedding Tswana law in families – equipping them to better engage dikgang. NGO, government, and donor performances of success also rely on the performance of kinship; in Chapter 15’s opening ceremony, idioms and ideals of kinship legitimise the work of government and civil society agencies, establishing their precedence over the families they serve. But their everyday work is also permeated – even generated – by unmarked, conflicting kinship dynamics. In their interventions, these agencies unsettle both the interdependencies and distinctions Batswana customarily make between kinship and politics; and, in doing so, they may create more profound challenges than the AIDS epidemic.

Dijo ga di ratanelwe.

Part II explores the economies of care among kin. Chapter 4 explores the Tswana understanding of care as a combination of sentiment, material provision, and work that affects the physical and social well-being of others – and as a key resource in the contribution economies of kinship. But the things, work, and sentiment of care can be disarticulated and are subject to competing claims by family, partners, and friends, with implications for self-making projects. Chapter 5 examines the tensions that arise between these obligations to contribute care – especially among siblings – and the uncertainty about whether people will contribute what they ought, to whom, and for how long, which make contributions of care a volatile source of dikgang. Care, in these terms, is perpetually subject to crisis; the dominant public health frameworks that cast AIDS as a ‘crisis of care’ overlook the ways in which the Tswana family routinely faces, copes with, and even regenerates itself through such crises. Chapter 6 concludes with a consideration of how NGO and government interventions aim to provide care in the form of food baskets and feeding programmes – but dissociate these from specific people and relationships, inadvertently creating new crises by doing so.

Go nna le lewapa go monate

The Crimean War bequeathed to Great Britain the Charge of the Light Brigade, a military disaster, and Florence Nightingale, a long-adored heroine. These epitomes of the conflict are not static emblems of Victorian England. They are lodestones for writing the nation’s past, forging its future, and assessing its annals. Other innovations and personages to emerge from the War also continue to exert their hold on ordinary Britons. The War inspired the Victoria Cross, a military award for valor, which holds its allure even today. More recently, Mary Seacole, a Caribbean-born hotelier and healer, has come to the fore as a Crimean heroine. Beyond the names of battles, heroes, and institutions, the Crimean War offered immaterial legacies. It engendered forms of masculinity and models of femininity, as well as practices of burial and structures of feeling. The notion of afterlife allows us to apprehend the longstanding, varied, and elusive effects of this mid-Victorian conflict. The six chapters of this book trace facets of the war and its legacies as they demonstrate the persistence of an overlooked conflict in the making of modern Britain.

Chapter 7, “Lessing on Generations and Freedom,” notes that while other English novelists – Lawrence, Woolf – wrote about characters mired in uncertainty about having children, none produced anything like the sequences of protracted vexation in Doris Lessing’s “Children of Violence” novels. This chapter takes in Lessing’s long career, from her first novel (The Grass Is Singing) to her last (Alfred and Emily), but it focuses on those 1950s and 1960s masterpieces, which track the heroine Martha Quest from adolescence to old age. Martha is riven by incompatible attitudes: a curiosity about motherhood is stymied by her antipathy toward becoming a mother. She cannot shake the conviction that in giving life to a new being she is shackling that being to a state of unfreedom. Martha, like her creator Lessing, is forced to ask whether only abandonment of one’s children can provide some small liberty to that next generation. In Lessing’s novels it is not only the mother who, encumbered by a baby, loses her freedom: it is also the child, beholden to the parent, who enters existence as an already subjected being.

Discussions of form in Irish poetry often equate formalist poetry with conservative politics. A more nuanced understanding of this relationship is that poetic form is a way of turning private experience into a publicly accessible commentary on the challenging times we inhabit. The women poets who came of age at the turn of the twenty-first century, including Sinéad Morrissey, Leontia Flynn, and Caitríona O’Reilly, are sometimes associated with a formalist turn in Irish poetry at the time, but in their embrace of form as in much else besides they are remarkably heterogeneous. All are distinguished by an international perspective, in their influences as much as their subject matter, and an attention to questions of form as embodiment, as well as a focus on the body itself. In their relationships with important precursors including Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath and Medbh McGuckian, they enact generational debates through their dialogues with form, from the ghazal and sestina to the chatty intimacies of the verse letter, vindicating the short lyric as a continuing space of freedom and resistance.

While theoretical, analytical, and methodological issues surrounding research on generations and generational differences at work have been thoroughly discussed, one topic that has received far less attention is the extent to which the inferences suggested by this research are appropriate. Therefore, the purpose of this effort is to review the recent-generations literature, identify the commonly represented inferences, and offer a critical review of the appropriateness of each. A qualitative review of the last ten years of published research found four main inferences: (1) organizations should adopt customized HR policies, (2) intergenerational conflict is inevitable, (3) generations should be led differently, and (4) the benefits of capitalizing on generational strengths. These inferences are critiqued using several different lenses including legal, methodological, practice, and theoretical. Our conclusion is that these inferences are not supported by the literature and that organizations should instead focus on broader work and workplace trends.

This chapter addresses generational changes and corresponding differences in personality, values, and attitudes. Both popular and academic interpretations of generations are described. We begin by defining generations, which are perhaps best thought of as fuzzy social constructs. Next, we detail key issues related to measurement of generations, notably teasing apart specific effects of age or development, culture or period, and birth cohort or generation. We describe two general models of how generations develop: a sociological model and cultural model. We also detail six models that predict the content of generations, from cyclical models to the no-change model. We argue for what we think are best practices for testing these ideas, while acknowledging the difficulties involved. We then describe some of the findings in the research regarding generational change as well as organizational specific findings. We conclude with a brief discussion of the future of research in this area.

Focusing on H. G. Wells’s scientific romances, “The Technology Age” argues that the volatile modernity of Wells’s fiction pivots on a failure of sympathy between the young and the old. This failure generates the deeply ambivalent conditions by which generational antagonism arises alongside modernity’s technological and social progress. Drawing on the work of Charles Booth and tracts by the Fabian society, I illustrate how socialist arguments for a universal pension depend upon youths imagining the older person they one day will become. Analyzing works such as The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, Food of the Gods, and In the Days of the Comet, this chapter highlights the multitemporality of the banal process of aging. In this regard, science fiction provides insight into the reality of aging in a way that conventional literary realism cannot.

“No Plots for Old Men” argues that aging raised a problem for Charles Dickens’s literary project: the novel’s difficulty of representing temporal continuity over long spans of time. For the old man, the meaningful plots of the nineteenth century—such as the bildungsroman or the marriage plot—are behind him. An object of little narrative interest from the perspective of these plots, the old man is continually activated in Dickens’s novels, setting up a competition between the natural death he staves off and the closure of the narrative in which he is enmeshed. By examining three of Dickens’s early novels, this chapter shows how old men are excluded from the youthful plot of development central to the progress of a modernizing society. No longer the subject of the plot and yet bound by ambition, the elderly male engages in a narrative compulsion that underlines the imaginative power of what has been left behind by both the realist novel and the modernity it represents. By doing so, the old man serves as the site through which Dickens addresses an impasse of the novel form, where its duration is marked by its inability to faithfully represent the texture of passing time.