Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Dossett
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
New Deal ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Government ◽  
Black Performance ◽  
Black Theatre ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Federal Theatre ◽  
African American Artists

Between 1935 and 1939, the United States government paid out-of-work artists to write, act, and stage theatre as part of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), a New Deal job relief program. In segregated “Negro Units” set up under the FTP, African American artists took on theatre work usually reserved for whites, staged Black versions of “white” classics, and developed radical new dramas. In this fresh history of the FTP Negro Units, Kate Dossett examines what she calls the Black performance community—a broad network of actors, dramatists, audiences, critics, and community activists—who made and remade Black theatre manuscripts for the Negro Units and other theatre companies from New York to Seattle. Tracing how African American playwrights and troupes developed these manuscripts and how they were then contested, revised, and reinterpreted, Dossett argues that these texts constitute an archive of Black agency, and understanding their history allows us to consider Black dramas on their own terms. The cultural and intellectual labor of Black theatre artists was at the heart of radical politics in 1930s America, and their work became an important battleground in a turbulent decade.

Free at Lass!

2020 ◽  
pp. 203-250
Author(s):  
Kate Dossett
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Orson Welles ◽  
Black Performance ◽  
Black Theatre ◽  
The Future ◽  
Performance Communities ◽  
Federal Theatre ◽  
Black Agency

The final chapter examines the Harlem Negro Unit’s immensely popular production of Haiti. Authored by white New York journalist William Dubois, white theatre critics attempted to place Haiti within a white dramatic tradition of Black primitivism which included Emperor Jones and Orson Welles’ recent Voodoo version of Macbeth. By contrast, the Black performance community worked to transform Dubois’s racist play into a celebration of the Haitian Republic’s Black heroes. The success of Haiti helped the Black performance community push the Federal Theatre to invest in Black dramatists. On the eve of the FTP’s closure two new Black dramas were being prepared for production: Panyared, (1939) explores the origins of African slavery and was the first instalment of a historical trilogy by Hughes Allison; Theodore Browne’s Go Down Moses (1938), is a dramatization of Harriet Tubman’s life which examines Black agency in ending slavery. While neither drama made it to the stage, centering Black theatre manuscripts, and the performance communities who developed them, allows us to see how African Americans imagined radical paths to the future.

Kate Dossett. Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal

Modern Drama ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 373-375
Author(s):  
Julie Burrell
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Federal Theatre Project ◽  
Black Performance ◽  
Black Theatre ◽  
Black Public Sphere ◽  
Performance Communities ◽  
Federal Theatre ◽  
The New Deal

Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal focuses on the Negro Units of the Federal Theatre Project (1935–39). Dossett argues that Black performance communities consisting of Black theatre artists and the Black public sphere helped shaped the performance and reception of theatre manuscripts in the New Deal era.

United States - African Relations

1972 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-51
Author(s):  
Aaron Segal
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Balance Of Payments ◽  
United States Government ◽  
Western Power ◽  
Modest Contribution ◽  
States Government ◽  
Out Of Africa ◽  
Negative Balance

African-American relations at present are characterized by a situation in which the United States government and United States investors take more resources out of Africa than they put in. There is a negative balance of payments in the flow of aid, trade, and other resources. Consequently, Africans are disappointed in America and have little faith in the ability of this Western power to make even a modest contribution to the resolution of African problems by African means.

Africa in the Shuffle

1995 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-23
Author(s):  
Immanuel Wallerstein
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
The New York Times ◽  
The U.S

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, the study of Africa in the United States was a very rare and obscure practice, engaged in almost exclusively by African-American (then called Negro) intellectuals. They published scholarly articles primarily in quite specialized journals, notably Phylon, and their books were never reviewed in the New York Times. As a matter of fact, at this time (that is, before 1945) there weren't even very many books written about African-Americans in the U.S., although the library acquisitions were not quite as rare as those for books about Africa.

The God of the Internet

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Goldsmith ◽  
Tim Wu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Essential Feature ◽  
Critical Time ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Government ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Human Operators ◽  
The Right ◽  
E Mail

If you had met Jon Postel in 1998, you might have been surprised to learn that you were in the presence of one of the Internet’s greatest living authorities. He had a rambling, ragged look, living in sandals and a large, unkempt beard. He lived like a modern-day Obi-Wan Kenobi, an academic hermit who favored solitary walks on the Southern California beach. When told once by a reporter that readers were interested in learning more about his personal life, he answered: “If we tell them, they won’t be interested anymore.” Yet this man was, and had been for as long as anyone could remember, the ultimate authority for assignment of the all-important Internet Protocol (IP) numbers that are the essential feature of Internet membership. Like the medallions assigned to New York City taxicabs, each globally unique number identifies a computer on the Net, determining who belongs and who doesn’t. “If the Net does have a God,” wrote the Economist in 1997, “he is probably Jon Postel.” Jon Postel was a quiet man who kept strong opinions and sometimes acted in surprising ways. The day of January 28, 1998, provided the best example. On that day Postel wrote an e-mail to the human operators of eight of the twelve “name servers” around the globe. Name servers are the critical computers that are ultimately responsible for making sure that when you type a name like google.com you reach the right address (123.23.83.0). On that day Postel asked the eight operators, all personally loyal to Postel, to recognize his computer as the “root,” or, in essence, the master computer for the whole Internet. The operators complied, pointing their servers to Postel’s computer instead of the authoritative root controlled by the United States government. The order made the operators nervous—Paul Vixie, one of the eight, quietly arranged to have someone look after his kids in case he was arrested. Postel was playing with fire. His act could have divided the Internet’s critical naming system into two gigantic networks, one headed by himself, the other headed by the United States. He engineered things so that the Internet continued to run smoothly. But had he wanted to during this critical time, he might have created chaos.

This Is Your Book: Marketing America to Itself

PMLA ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 118 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lori Ween
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ivory Tower ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Book World ◽  
Important Shift

In February 2001, Knopf Publishing Company, a division of Random House, reportedly purchased the rights to publish two novels by Stephen L. Carter for $4 million. As the Daily Variety Gotham stated, “Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter emerged from the ivory tower last week and shook the book world from its February doldrums” (Bing 43). And the New York Times wrote, “The advance is among the highest ever paid for a first novel and is all the more unusual because of the author's background. Mr. Carter, 46, is an African-American who has written several works of nonfiction, including ‘Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby’ and ‘The Culture of Disbelief‘” (Kirkpatrick, “Knopf”). Whether this purchase is considered “unusual” because it is a first novel or because the author is African American, it is part of an important shift for American literature: the jacket art, prepublication publicity, and sales materials shape this novel as a mainstream, blockbuster, best-selling legal thriller, not as an African American novel per se. The mainstream feel of Carter's novel brings up pertinent questions about race, literature, and the marketing of ethnic identity in the United States. Looking at the positioning of this novel allows us to understand how the publishers, newspaper reporters, and marketers have planted seeds that will influence the reception of the text by reviewers and readers.

scholarly journals The Price of Poverty: Policy Implications of the Unequal Effects of Monetary Sanctions on the Poor

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-65
Author(s):  
Ilya Slavinski ◽  
Kimberly Spencer-Suarez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Low Income ◽  
The United States ◽  
Policy Implications ◽  
Federal State ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Time Requirements ◽  
State And Local ◽  
Set Up

Over the last several decades, with the rise of mass incarceration in the United States and its steep costs, governments at the federal, state, and local levels have dramatically ramped up monetary punishment. Monetary sanctions are now the most common type of criminal penalty in the United States. The growth of fines, fees, and other legal financial obligations (LFOs), and the ensuing legal debt, reflect a shifting of the system’s costs onto its primarily low-income and indigent subjects. This study provides an exploration of previously underexamined ways in which monetary sanctions impose distinct burdens on the poor. Interviews with 121 defendants in Texas and New York, along with courtroom observations, demonstrate that criminal legal debt is particularly challenging for people with low incomes in three meaningful ways. First, systems set up to handle indigency claims do not adequately address the needs or complex individual circumstances of those who simply do not have the ability to pay. Oftentimes, alternatives are unavailable or statutorily prohibited. Second, the lack of alternatives to payment lead to compromising situations, which then compel indigent defendants to make difficult choices about how to allocate scant resources. Finally, being encumbered with fines and fees and participating in alternatives like community service comes with taxing time requirements that can prove uniquely challenging for those who are poor. These three findings lead us to propose a series of policy recommendations revolving around three key themes: (a) enhancement of indigency procedures, (b) equity in monetary sanctions, and (c) alleviating burdens by improving accessibility.

The state of Ireland in the 1820s: James Cropper's plan

1971 ◽  
Vol 17 (67) ◽  
pp. 320-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Charlton
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
New York State ◽  
The United States ◽  
Canal System ◽  
Black Ball ◽  
The People ◽  
Trading Activities ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The City

In 1825 there was published in Liverpool a pamphlet of 59 pages entitled The present state of Ireland, with a plan for improving the position of the people. Its author was James Cropper, a quaker merchant of that city and senior partner of the firm Cropper, Benson and Co. As a young man he had been apprenticed to the firm of Rathbone, Benson and Co., living and working in the small circle of liberal radicals in the city, of whom the Rathbones, the Binns and the Roscoes were perhaps the most famous. In 1799 he had set up business on his own account, and later joined in partnership with another quaker, Thomas Benson, son of Rathbone's partner, as Cropper, Benson and Co. The firm engaged in a wide variety of commission trading, but increasingly specialized in cotton imports from the United States of America, acting also as the Liverpool agent for the Black Ball line of packets which from 1818 provided the first regular passenger sailings between New York and Liverpool. As an ‘ American ’ merchant in Liverpool, Cropper helped to form the American chamber of commerce in the port, serving as treasurer and later as president. Besides his trading activities Cropper was a founder-director of the Liverpool-Manchester Railyway and he also invested heavily in the New York State canal system.

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