Gathering Black Subjectivities and Cultural Memory in Alice Childress’s Wine in the Wilderness
This chapter frames Alice Childress's 1969 teleplay Wine in the Wilderness, as a counternarrative to cultural memory's master narrative of the African American Freedom Struggle era. Childress explores the intersections of class, race, and gender in Wine in the Wilderness's representations, situating the Harlem Civil Disturbance of 1965 during which the play takes place as a site enabling productive reflection on and reconsideration of the rhetorical and representational strategies underwriting some Black Arts cultural expression and, by extension, African American identity. The chapter argues that Wine in the Wilderness troubles blackness and disrupts the standard ideas associated with it, consequently creating a new meaning. The play's counternarrative constitutes black solidarity and black consciousness through its critique of the sometimes reductive gender and class ideologies underwriting certain strains of the Black Arts Movement's cultural production alongside an alternate history of black protest led by African American fraternal organizations.