Immigration on stage
Sparked by his own journey, Dr. Jeffrey Coleman examines the role of African immigrants in Spanish theatre
By Jim Higgins, Jour ’79
Two teenage stowaways from Guinea found frozen to death in the wheel bay of a jet airliner at the Brussels airport in 1999 might have faded from public memory, if not for the letter found with them.
“We suffer too much in Africa. … We need you to fight against poverty and to put an end to the war in Africa,” Yaguine Koita and Fodé Tounkara wrote, addressing “officials of Europe.”
In his scholarship, Dr. Jeffrey Coleman, assistant professor of languages, literatures and cultures, has turned to this letter repeatedly in illuminating problems of race and immigration in Europe, particular as seen through the lens of Spanish theatre.
In considering playwright Juan Diego Botto’s dramatization of Koita and Tounkara in his play El Privilegio de Ser Perro, Coleman casts the boys as emissaries challenging “Europe’s amnesia in regards to its colonial and neo-colonial connection to Africa.”
Coleman’s forthcoming book, The Necropolitical Theater: Race and Immigration on the Contemporary Spanish Stage, examines how Spanish plays between 1991 and 2016 treat three major migrant groups: Latin Americans, North Africans (mostly Moroccans) and sub-Saharan Africans.
In the case of the last group, “they never survive the play,” Coleman says. They die en route, get to Spain and die from illness, or meet some other doom, such as being murdered by neo-Nazis, he explains.
By exposing these patterns, Coleman hopes to make Spanish theatre professionals more conscious of how they treat race and immigration onstage. “One thing I found troubling in the research is a lot of the playwrights weren’t even conscious of the patterns they were producing or reproducing.”
His own immigrant experience partially fuels his scholarly interest. Born in Ghana, Coleman came to the United States as a boy with his family, after an intermediate stay in Spain.
“That’s where the desire to learn Spanish actually came from when I was younger,” he says. Coleman earned his doctorate in Spanish from the University of Chicago.
On a research trip, Coleman met with a collective of black actors in Madrid, leading to inclusion in a WhatsApp messaging group that keeps him informed of controversies, such as a casting debacle involving a white actor in blackface playing a black drag queen in a Spanish production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.
Coleman is now broadening his research to consider representations of blackness in Spanish popular culture, including stereotypical black figures on the packaging of the Spanish candy Conguitos and the tradition in many cities of having a white actor in blackface portray Balthazar on Three Kings Day.
“What does it mean,” he asks, “that Spain is still propagating these types of images when there are now thousands if not millions of black citizens and migrants living there?”
