Title Harlem's theaters : a staging ground for community, class, and contradiction, 1923-1939 / Adrienne Macki Braconi

Published Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2015 ©2015

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Description 1 online resource (xii, 267 pages : illustrations) Contents Introduction: "Parent to hope" -- 1923-1928 -- Constructing racial uplift, class, and propaganda -- Constituting community -- 1929-1934 -- Staging sacred and secular experiments -- Per/(re)forming the community -- 1935-1939 -- Re-visioning the community -- Playing with history, signs, and fables -- Epilogue Summary "Based on a vast amount of archival research, Adrienne Macki Braconi's illuminating study of three important community-based theaters in Harlem shows how their work was essential to the formation of a public identity for African Americans and the articulation of their goals, laying the groundwork for the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement. Macki Braconi uses textual analysis, performance reconstruction, and audience reception to examine the complex dynamics of productions by the Krigwa Players, the Harlem Experimental Theatre, and the Negro Theatre of the Federal Theatre Project. Even as these theaters demonstrated the extraordinary power of activist art, they also revealed its limits. The stage was a site on which ideological and class differences played out, theater being both a force for change and a collision of contradictory agendas. Macki Braconi's book alters our understanding of the Harlem Renaissance, the roots of the Civil Rights Movement, and the history of community theater in America"-- Provided by publisher Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 229-258) and index Subject Theater -- New York (State) -- New York -- History -- 20th century Theaters -- New York (State) -- New York -- History -- 20th century African American theater -- New York (State) -- New York -- History -- 20th century Civil rights movements -- United States -- History -- 20th century PERFORMING ARTS / Theater / History & Criticism. African American theater Civil rights movements Intellectual life Theater Theaters Schwarze Theater Kulturleben Bürgerrechtsbewegung SUBJECT Harlem (New York, N.Y.) -- Intellectual life -- 20th century Subject New York (State) -- New York New York (State) -- New York -- Harlem United States New York- Harlem Genre/Form History Form Electronic book LC no. 2015031416 ISBN 9780810132245 0810132249

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