A View from the Middle: Teaching Nineteenth-Century African American Theatre and Performance

2009 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-108
Author(s):  
Michelle Granshaw ◽  
Douglas A. Jones Jr.
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
And Performance

Voices of Thunder

2019 ◽  
pp. 36-83
Author(s):  
Cheryl A. Wall
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Oral Performance ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
David Walker ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Written Word ◽  
Maria Stewart

This chapter accounts for the centrality of nineteenth-century black oral culture to the development of the essay as a distinct African American literary genre. The author illustrates how the sermons and orations of nineteenth-century men and women such as David Walker, Maria Stewart, Henry Highland Garnet, Frances Harper, and Fredrick Douglass laid the foundation for the African American essay. It is shown how these authors combined accounts of their personal experience with traditions of oral performance. Because the line between the spoken and written word was blurred by nineteenth-century conventions, these authors blended various rhetorical and performance strategies to shape the art of the essay. In doing so, these writers became “voices of thunder.”The essayists discussed in this chapter used biblical references and appropriated democratic discourse to advance anti-slavery agendas. They appropriated the rhetoric of the founding documents of the American republic and remade them into the rhetoric of counterrevolution. Their works emphasized the material realities of life in America for blacks, both enslaved and free. Their expressions of freedom, and the rhetorical strategies they modelled informed the work of their literary descendants.

‘I was your slave’: Revisioning kinship in Toni Morrison and Rokia Traoré’s Desdemona

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 237-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Rapetti
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Nobel Laureate ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Shared Spaces ◽  
And Performance ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
Shakespearean Tragedy

This article offers a critical reading of Desdemona (2012), a cross-cultural theatre adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello staged by American theatre and opera director Peter Sellars, with texts by African American Nobel laureate Toni Morrison and music and lyrics by Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré. By drawing on early modern race studies and Marshall Sahlin’s notion of ‘mutuality of being’, the article discusses Morrison’s lyrical prose as well as Traoré’s songs and performance to show how they merge and amplify one another in Sellars’ meditative staging to jointly rearticulate early modern notions of race, kinship and family embedded in Othello. By questioning what lies dormant, unseen and unheard in the Shakespearean tragedy, Desdemona supplements it with what Imtiaz Habib has termed ‘imprints of the invisible’ and invites its readers and audiences to ponder the onset of European colonialism, the slave trade, colour-based racism and their global aftermath, positing theatre as a metaphor for other civic, shared spaces where honest conversations about race, gender and class inequalities can open up a path to healing and reconciliation.

From the Margins to Center Stage: Tyler Perry’s Popular African American Theatre

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rashida Z. Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Center Stage ◽  
Black Performance ◽  
History Of

If Perry now functions as a platform onto himself, his career began with seemingly much less broad, but no less significant, aspirations. In her analysis of taste, class, and the popular, in Chapter TwoRashida D. Shaw places Tyler Perry’s career within the context of a Black performance and theatre history that extends back to the nineteenth century, as she centralizes the history of the “Chitlin Circuit” or “Urban Theatre.” After establishing a literary cultural history that frames and restages the popularity, appeal, and reception of Perry’s plays, Shaw’s analysis more closely explores the ramifications of Perry’s behind-the-scenes role and onstage presence at the 2012 Tony Awards during a year that resulted in numerous historic successes for not only African American theatre-makers, but also for African American–centric productions in general.

A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910–1927. By David Krasner. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002; pp. 370. $35 cloth; Stories of Freedom in Black New York. By Shane White. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002; pp. 260. $27.95 cloth.

2004 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-125
Author(s):  
Lisa B. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
Dramatic Literature ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
The Family ◽  
And Performance

In “Writing the Absent Potential: Drama, Performance, and the Canon of African-American Literature,” Sandra Richards argues that scholars largely ignore the African-American contribution to theatre and performance. She suspects that most critics regard “drama as a disreputable member of the family of literature” (65). Even African Americanists neglect dramatic literature; indeed, the Norton Anthology of African American Literature includes only a scant number of plays. Both David Krasner and Shane White effectively redress this oversight and shift the focus from African-American literature to blacks on stage in their recent monographs about early nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century drama.

Highlights of African American Theatre and Performance

2018 ◽  
pp. 7-18
Author(s):  
Alexander Craft Renée ◽  
F. DeFrantz Thomas ◽  
A. Perkins Kathy ◽  
L. Richards Sandra
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
And Performance
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