6 The Early African American Theatre of Joshua McCarter Simpson during the Civil War

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauri Scheyer
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
American Theatre

Channelling the dead: A conversation on Desdemona with Tina Benko

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Rapetti
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
African American ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
York City ◽  
Nobel Laureate ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Broad Variety ◽  
Character Building

Tina Benko is an American stage, screen and television actress who has steadily trodden the Broadway boards for twenty years while starring in films and TV series and teaching acting and movement in New York City. An intensely focused and versatile performer, Benko has played in a broad variety of genres, ranging from screwball and Shakespearean comedies to realistic Russian, Scandinavian and American plays. In this interview, she discusses the factors that attracted her to drama and theatre, her acting training and approach to character-building, and theatre as a space for healing and reconciliation as she experienced it while working in 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.

Generations

2019 ◽  
pp. 51-71
Author(s):  
Lisa Woolfork
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
African American Authors ◽  
Black Life ◽  
A Site ◽  
Post Civil Rights ◽  
American Authors

This essay explores the ways in which African American authors of that era reclaim the slave past as a site of memory for a nation eager to forget. Lucille Clifton’s Generations (1976), Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976), and Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) are the chapter’s main focus. These works resist the tide of historical amnesia and “lost cause” mythology that would minimize or relegate the enslaved to mere props in the larger Civil War drama of rupture and reconciliation. By centering the stories of the enslaved as ancestral foundations of post-civil rights black life, these authors promote a model for historical memory and genealogy that elevates black resilience.

Thyra Edwards’s Spanish Civil War Scrapbook

2019 ◽  
pp. 101-122
Author(s):  
Anne Donlon
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Black History ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Record Keeping ◽  
Feminist History ◽  
History Of

This essay examines the life of African American social worker Thyra Edwards, who traveled to Spain during its civil war, and returned home to fund-raise and organize. She created a scrapbook, a public-facing record of African American women’s efforts on behalf of Republican Spain, made up of photographs prepared for publication and articles about her efforts circulated in newspapers. This feminist perspective of the “folks at home” is a crucial addendum to black history of the war in Spain. Edwards’s scrapbook is a multifaceted document: a kind of autobiography that is self-conscious in its historical record-keeping, an account of a very broad black Popular Front, and a black feminist history of the Spanish Civil War.

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