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

Published Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2015

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Description 1 online resource Contents Cover; Contents; Acknowledgments; Introduction: The Postblack Ethos in "Texts Out of Time": Rosa Parks and the African American Freedom Struggle in Cultural Memory; Chapter One: "One for Whom Bread-Food-Is Not Enough": Beneatha Younger, Uplift Ideology, and Intellectual Freedom; Chapter Two: "A Ghost of the Future": Racial (Mis)perception and Black Subjectivity in LeRoi Jones's Dutchman; Chapter Three: "Ghost(s) in the House!": Black Subjectivity and Howard Sackler's The Great White Hope Chapter Four: Gathering Black Subjectivities and Cultural Memory in Alice Childress's Wine in the WildernessChapter Five: Prefiguring Postblackness in Charles Gordone's No Place to Be Somebody: A Black Black Comedy in Three Acts; Coda: Postblackness's Ancestors and Relatives or "The Past Pushing Us into the Present"; Notes; Bibliography; Index; A; B; C; D; E; F; G; H; I; J; K; L; M; N; O; P; Q; R; S; T; U; V; W; Y; Z 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"-- Provided by publisher Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher 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. HISTORY / United States / 20th Century. LITERARY CRITICISM / Drama. African American theater African Americans in literature African Americans -- Race identity American drama American drama -- African American authors Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. Form Electronic book LC no. 2015017042 ISBN 9781496803009 1496803000 9781496802996 1496802993 9781496803023 1496803027

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