I am a lecturer in Drama at Jazan University, Saudi Arabia and a doctoral researcher at Loughborough University, UK. Under the supervision of Professor Siân Adiseshiah and Dr Andrew Dix, my Ph.D. thesis, provisionally titled ‘Staging Black Female Voices: Dramatisations of Silence, Anger and Desire in Contemporary African American and Black British Women’s Theatre’, adopts a transatlantic focus and centres upon detailed study of four playwrights: Lynn Nottage and Cesi Davidson from the United States, and debbie tucker green and Mojisola Adebayo from the UK. My research is grounded in Black feminist theory, particularly theorisations of voice and silence, and is attentive to questions of performance as well as textual detail.

This paper examines the potent role of anger in Mojisola Adebayo’s Black feminist articulation of decolonisation in Moj of the Antarctic (2011). Its focus is the intersection of place (the Antarctic), politics (colonial legacies) and performance in the context of decolonisation and Black feminist politics. Set against the stark backdrop of the Antarctic – a space historically associated with colonial exploration and power – the play offers a powerful illumination of Black women’s experiences of violence and colonialism. Drawing on Black (and other) feminist articulations of the value of anger, including Audre Lorde’s ‘The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism’ (1981), Maria Lugones’ concept of ‘Hard-to-handle anger’ (2003), Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Transition-Anger’ (2016) and Sara Ahmed’s notion of‘ feminist fragile sheltering’ (2017), this paper demonstrates how the anger of Moj (the playwright / protagonist) functions as a catalyst for both personal transformation and the enablement of political agency. This newfound agency empowers her to perform diverse identities and transgress national borders, in the process challenging colonial power structures. I argue that Moj’s second-order anger – a future-directed form of anger (Lugones: 2003:23) – acts as a bridge between Lugones’ oppositional concepts of the ‘cocoon’ (a solitary space of internal transformation) and the ‘hangout’ (a collective space of transgression and alternative sense-making), demonstrating how a seemingly uncommunicated anger has the potential to foster both individual resistance and collective action. By situating Moj’s anger within the context of the play’s Antarctic setting, this paper contributes to a decolonial understanding of how performance and place intersect to shape feminist resistance against the enduring legacies of empire. The seemingly remote Antarctic becomes, in this reading, a potent site for imagining decolonisation and challenging neocolonial power structures.

Key words:

Mojisola Adebayo, anger, Antarctic, Black women, Black feminism, decolonisation, feminist resistance, performance, place, spatiality, transformation.

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