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Transnational Feminism in 21St Century Black American Drama and Performance

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Transnational Feminism in 21St Century Black American Drama and Performance Transnational Feminism in 21st Century Black American Drama and Performance By Kate Nygren Submitted to the graduate degree program in English and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ____________________________________ Co-Chairperson Iris Smith Fischer ____________________________________ Co-Chairperson Darren Canady ____________________________________ Doreen Fowler ____________________________________ Giselle Anatol ____________________________________ Jane Barnette Date Defended: May 8, 2019 ii The Dissertation Committee for Kate Nygren Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Transnational Feminism in 21st Century Black American Drama and Performance _________________________________ Co-Chairperson Iris Smith Fischer _________________________________ Co-Chairperson Darren Canady Date approved: May 8, 2019 iii Abstract “Transnational Feminism in 21st Century Black American Drama and Performance” explores twenty-first century works from playwrights who I group together loosely under the current transnational moment of playwriting. I include works from Tarell Alvin McCraney, Danai Gurira, Nikkole Salter, Lynn Nottage, Robert O’Hara, and Katori Hall. My primary aims are to extend due scholarly attention to these playwrights, several of whom have not yet received appropriate focus, and in so doing, begin the work of periodizing these twenty-first century playwrights, whose work I argue is united by a heading I will redefine and expand in these pages: African diasporic performance. With a multidisciplinary approach unified through transnational feminisms, I find that these works reveal the global through its impact on the local and—when set outside the United States—reveal the global through careful storytelling that avoids monoliths and calls out global forces and audiences’ implicit and explicit role in oppressions. My study centers materialist readings through a transnational feminist lens and takes interest in extending the ongoing feminist effort to reclaim realism as a politically- impactful theatrical form. Ultimately, I argue that these playwrights’ work should be more widely produced and celebrated for its ability to make visible global networks that demonstrate sometimes surprising, but often obscured opportunities for strategic coalition. iv Acknowledgments This project would not have been possible without the extraordinary mentorship and support I received throughout its creation. Early in the project’s conception, I was awarded admittance and funding for the 2016 Summer Institute: Theatre and Erasure at Northwestern University. I was able to present a portion of the third chapter for my fellow attendees and mentors including Soyika Diggs Colbert, David Román, Dassia Posner, and Liz Son. Their generous feedback assured me of the value of the project, while helping me reform my thinking around a few framing concepts. The final product is much stronger for that early intervention. The guidance and challenges provided by my dissertation committee have been invaluable. From Jane Barnette’s early efforts to help me develop a two-minute speech capturing the project’s flavor to Giselle Anatol’s and Doreen Fowler’s insightful questions and critiques at the proposal stage, this dissertation had strong grounding and direction. As my co-chair, Darren Canady dedicated many precious hours of his time to talk through chapter drafts, rather than providing solely written comments. These conversations somehow managed to help me see errors and gaps in my thinking while simultaneously reigniting my excitement about the arguments themselves. I always left these meetings with renewed focus and confidence. My co- chair, Iris Smith Fischer, deserves more praise than a single acknowledgements section can contain. Iris has taught and mentored me one-on-one for six years. The summer that I arrived in Lawrence, the first person to reach out to me was Iris. During my time at KU, she has been my main constant: a calming presence consistently challenging and bettering my scholarship. She is an outstanding teacher and mentor, and this dissertation simply wouldn’t exist without her sharp eye and guidance. v I’m deeply grateful for the support and community I received from my colleagues throughout this process. Writing dates with Hannah Scupham, Megan Dennis, Amanda Sladek, and many more have kept me on track and prevented me from being too much in my own head. In an experience that can feel quite isolating, these close friends reminded me that writing is a social process—truly a conversation. I’m also indebted to the generous support of my office colleagues and supervisors Sarah Crawford-Parker and Howard Graham. Their encouragement made finishing a dissertation while working a full-time job much more pleasant than I could have predicted. My family’s encouragement has been vital in reaching this goal. My husband Blake Cauble-Johnson has only ever known me as a graduate student, and throughout this long process, he has always maintained the confidence in my abilities that occasionally flagged in my own self-perception. His patience and self-sacrifice have made this work possible. And finally, I would never have pursued my interests in theatre if not for my mom, Elizabeth Groce. She’s been steadily feeding our shared theatre habit since I was young, and our yearly “research” trips to New York have not just sharpened my critical faculties, but have given me some of the best memories I’ll ever have. vi Table of Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: Transnational Feminism, Americanness, and Queer Dreaming in Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Brother/Sister Plays ................................................................................................. 26 Chapter Two: Realism, Activism, and Affect: Reimagining African Women at War ................ 52 Chapter Three: Globalization and Black Movements: “Scrambling” Spaces in Danai Gurira and Nikkole Salter’s In the Continuum and Robert O’Hara’s Antebellum .......................................... 89 Chapter Four: Neoimperialism in Contemporary Black Drama: Examining Katori Hall’s Hurt Village and Lynn Nottage’s Sweat .............................................................................................. 117 Coda: What is the Future Real Conditional of African Diasporic Performance? ...................... 151 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 157 1 Introduction The main productive vision for the future of Black Studies, I think, will consider the larger context, the impact of transnational capitalism on our communities, of overincarceration, overcriminalization, undereducation, and a whole host of social problems that have arisen as a result of the de-industrialization of the economy and the migration of corporations precisely to those countries from which people end up following the same circuits of immigration in order to come to this country to look for a better life. (Angela Davis, qtd. in Boyce Davies x-xi) Much of the critical conversation surrounding the work of contemporary United States playwrights of the African diaspora tends to reinforce national boundaries. Such scholarly focuses interrogate a distinct American identity and often explore the complexities of what it means to be and to represent people of color in the United States. Indeed, much of this late- twentieth and early-twenty-first century work demands this investigation. Begun in the early 1980s, Anna Deavere Smith’s long, multi-work project, On the Road: A Search for American Character, narrows in on specific events in the United States’ recent history—the Crown Heights crisis of 1991 and the mass reaction to the Rodney King verdict in 1992, for example—and gathers the exact testimony of a wide range of citizens describing their relationship to the events. Suzan-Lori Parks’s interest in United States’ history (in the figure and mythos of Abraham Lincoln) and the most traditionally canonical American texts (Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter) exhibits a similar fascination with the national. However, increasingly, concerns of globalization and the growth of African diasporic studies demand scholarship that places national issues in a global context. Globalization—the corporatization that enables western, wealthy countries to engage in exploitative labor practices in less-developed countries, intertwining world workers’ 2 realities—and the information technology that makes these practices possible generate a global impact too pronounced to speak of national identity as self-contained. The work of United States authors of the African diaspora reveals a good deal about this country’s real and imagined position in the world. Furthermore, when considered in the light of transnational feminisms, these plays offer one avenue towards understanding how to best negotiate social justice advocacy in a global context. This study explores twenty-first century works from playwrights who I group together loosely because their work falls within this transnational moment of playwrighting. The works come from Tarell Alvin McCraney, Danai Gurira, Nikkole Salter, Lynn Nottage, Robert O’Hara, and Katori Hall. My primary aims are to extend due scholarly attention to these playwrights,
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