African American Performance and Theater History: a Critical Reader
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African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader Harry J. Elam, Jr. David Krasner, Editors OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS African American Performance and Theater History This page intentionally left blank ‘ ‘ African American Performance and Theater History a critical reader ‘‘‘ Edited by Harry J. Elam, Jr. David Krasner 1 2001 1 Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota´ Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence HongKong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Sa˜o Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright ᭧ 2001 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-PublicationData African American performance and theater history: a critical reader / edited by Harry J. Elam, Jr. and David Krasner. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–19–512724–2; ISBN 0–19–512725–0 (pbk.) 1. Afro-American theater. 2. American drama—Afro-American authors—History and criticism. I. Elam,Harry Justin. II. Krasner, David, 1952– PN2270.A35A46 2000 792'.089'96073—dc21 00–022463 987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Acknowledgments Many people have contributed to making this book possible. We would like to begin by thanking our first editor, T. Susie Chang, for all her work and support of this manuscript. We also thank her successor, Elissa Morris, for seeing this book through to fruition. We are grateful to all the contributors for their commitment, hard work, and insightful chapters. Lisa Thompson and Nicole Hickman, two Ph.D. candidates in the Modern Thought and Literature Program at Stanford, worked diligently to compile the bibliography on African American theater and performance. Hickman also helped with the editing and proofreading processes. We appreciate the efforts of Ron Davies, the administrator in the Department of Drama at Stanford, for preparing the manuscript for publication and of Susan Sebbard, Assistant Director of the Humanities Center at Stanford, for her careful proofreading of the volume. Harry Elam acknowledges the support of Janelle Reinelt, Professor of Drama at the University of California, Davis, and his life partner, Leonade Jones, for their readings and honest critiques of his contributions to this anthology. David Krasner acknowledges the support and hard work of the Theater Studies’ assistant at Yale, Jan Foery, and his most significant other, Lynda Intihar. This book was published with the assistance of the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University. We owe an enormous debt to those who went before us, and we are grateful that they have constructed a ground on which we now walk. Our study is a continuation of a tradition built on the works of historians, scholars, and critics, such as William Branch, Winona Fletcher, Paul Carter Harrison, Samuel Hay, Errol Hill, James Weldon Johnson, Lofton Mitchell, Thomas Pawley, and Bernard Peterson. We dedicate these chapters to these scholars, inparticular,ProfessorErrolHill—brillianthistorian,editor,andresearcher. If our efforts come close to reaching the standards he has set, we will have accomplished our goals. Stanford, California HJE jr New Haven, Connecticut DK September 2000 This page intentionally left blank Contents Contributors xi The Device of Race: An Introduction 3 harry j. elam, jr. part i: social protest and the politics of representation 17 1 Uncle Tom’s Women 19 judith williams 2 Political Radicalism and Artistic Innovation in the Works of Lorraine Hansberry 40 margaret b. wilkerson 3 The Black Arts Movement: Performance, Neo-Orality, and the Destruction of the “White Thing” 56 mike sell 4 Beyond a Liberal Audience 81 william sonnega part ii: cultural traditions, cultural memory, and performance 99 5 Deep Skin: Reconstructing Congo Square 101 joseph r. roach 6 “Calling on the Spirit”: The Performativity of Black Women’s Faith in the Baptist Church Spiritual Traditions and Its Radical Possibilities for Resistance 114 telia u. anderson 7 The Chitlin Circuit 132 henry louis gates, jr. 8 Audience and Africanisms in August Wilson’s Dramaturgy: A Case Study 149 sandra g. shannon part iii: intersections of race and gender 169 9 Black Minstrelsy and Double Inversion, Circa 1890 171 annemarie bean 10 Black Salome: Exoticism, Dance, and Racial Myths 192 david krasner 11 Uh Tiny Land Mass Just Outside of My Vocabulary: Expression of Creative Nomadism and Contemporary African American Playwrights 212 kimberly d. dixon 12 Attending Walt Whitman High: The Lessons of Pomo Afro Homos’ Dark Fruit 235 jay plum part iv: african american performativity and the performance of race 249 13 Acting Out Miscegenation 251 diana r. paulin 14 Birmingham’s Federal Theater Project Negro Unit: The Administration of Race 271 tina redd 15 The Black Performer and the Performance of Blackness: The Escape; or, A Leap to Freedom by William Wells Brown and No Place To Be Somebody by Charles Gordone 288 harry j. elam, jr. 16 The Costs of Re-Membering: What’s at Stake in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora 306 christina e. sharpe part v: roundtable discussion with senior scholars 329 17 African American Theater: The State of the Profession, Past, Present, and Future 331 viii Contents Roundtable discussion edited by harry j. elam, jr., and david krasner Afterword: Change Is Coming 345 David Krasner Selected Bibliography 351 Index 357 Contents ix This page intentionally left blank Contributors TELIA U. ANDERSON teaches English and African studies at New York City Technical College. She graduated cum laude from Yale in 1991 and earned an M.A. in theater studies from Brown in 1997. She won the New Scholar’s Prize, given by the International Federation for Theatre Research, in 1996 for an earlier version of her chapter, “Calling on the Spirit.” ANNEMARIE BEAN is an assistant professor of Theater at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts. She was managing editor of the Drama Re- view for three years; is the coeditor, with James V. Hatch and Brooks McNamara, of Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Black- face Minstrelsy (1996); winner of the 1997 Errol Hill Award, given by the AmericanSocietyforTheatreResearchforoutstandingscholarshipinAfrican American theater studies; and she is editor of A Sourcebook of African-American Performance (1999). Her current project is a study of gender impersonation by white and African American nineteenth-century minstrels. KIMBERLY D. DIXON is completing her dissertation on contemporaryAfrican American women playwrights in Northwestern University’s interdiscipli- nary Ph.D. program in Theater and Drama. She is a graduate of Yale Uni- versity and UCLA, with degrees in theater, African American studies, and psychology. She has published on Suzan-Lori Parks in American Drama.In addition, Dixon is an emerging playwright and screenwriter. HARRY J. ELAM, JR., is Christensen Professor for the Humanities, director of graduate studies in Drama, and chair of the Committee on Black Performing Arts at Stanford University. He is author of Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka (1997) and coeditor, with Robert Alexander, of Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Plays (1996). He is finishing a book entitled (W)Righting History: The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson. He has published articlesinTheatreJournal,TextandPerformanceQuarterly,andAmericanDrama, as well as contributed to several critical anthologies. HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR., is the chair of the Afro-American Studies Depart- ment and director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Studies at Harvard University. He is a prolific writer and scholar, who has authored and coauthored several books, edited or coedited many more, and written numerous articles for such magazines as the New Yorker, Time, and the New Republic. His many books include Figures in Black: Works, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (1987), The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American LiteraryCriticism(1988),LooseCanons:NotesontheCultureWars(1992),Colored People: A Memoir (1994), The Future of the Race (1996), and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (1997). JAMES V. HATCH is professor emeritus of English and Theater at City College of the City University of New York. His publications include a biography, Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One: The Life of Owen Dodson, which wontheBernard Hewitt Award for best theater history book published in 1993. He is co- founder, with his wife, Camille Billops, of the Hatch-Billops Collection and Archive in African American cultural history. DAVID KRASNER is director of undergraduate Theater Studies at Yale Uni- versity, where he teaches theater history and literature, dramatic criticism, acting, and directing. His book Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895–1910 (1997) received the 1998 Errol Hill Award from the American Society for Theatre Research. He is the editor of Method Acting Reconsidered: Theory, Practice, Future (2000) and is currently workingonhisnextbook,BlackPerformanceandtheHarlemRenaissance:African