Prefiguring postblackness : cultural memory, drama, and the African American freedom struggle of the 1960s /

Saved in:

Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	Bunch Davis, Carol, author.
Imprint:	Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, [2015]
Description:	x, 210 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Language:	English
Subject:	American drama -- African American authors -- History and criticism. American drama -- 20th century -- History and criticism. African Americans -- Race identity. African Americans in literature. African American theater. African American theater. African Americans in literature. African Americans -- Race identity. American drama. American drama -- African American authors. Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Format:	Print Book
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/10424464

Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:	9781496802989 1496802985 9781496802996
Notes:	Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary:	"Prefiguring Postblackness explores the tensions between cultural memory of the African American Freedom Struggle and representations of African American identity staged in five plays produced between 1959 and 1969 during the Freedom Struggle era. Carol Bunch Davis shows how these plays' representations complicate reductive iterations of blackness, which often limit the Freedom Struggle era to Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest and cast Malcolm X's black nationalism as undermining civil rights movement's advances. These five plays strategically revise the rhetoric, representations, ideologies, and iconography of the African American Freedom Struggle, subverting its dominant narrative. This revision critiques racial uplift ideology's tenets of civic and moral virtue as a condition of African American full citizenship, as well as reimagines the Black Arts movement's restrictive notions of black authenticity as a condition of racial identity. These staged representations construct a counter-narrative to cultural memory of the Freedom Struggle in the very midst of that era. In their use of a "postblack ethos" to enact African American subjectivity, the plays envision black identity beyond the quest for freedom, anticipating what blackness might look like when it moves beyond the struggle for collective freedom. The plays range from the canonical (Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun and Amiri Baraka's Dutchman) to celebrated, yet understudied works (Alice Childress's Wine in the Wilderness; Howard Sackler's The Great White Hope; Charles Gordone's No Place to Be Somebody). Finally, Davis discusses recent revivals, showing how these 1960s plays shape dimensions of modern drama well beyond the decade of their creation"--
Other form:	Online version: Bunch Davis, Carol. Prefiguring postblackness Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2015 9781496802996

Review by Library Journal Review

Davis (English, Texas A&M) examines five plays from the civil rights era-from Lorraine Hansberry's Raisin in the Sun to Amiri Baraka's Dutchman-as a way to complicate popular conceptions of blackness. © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Review by Library Journal Review

Prefiguring postblackness : cultural memory, drama, and the African American freedom struggle of the 1960s /

Similar Items