This course will examine Black theater and performance traditions in the United States – from William Alexander Brown’s African Grove to the era of “Post-Black” plays. We will survey and analyze aesthetic innovations and transformations in the Black dramaturgical imagination and carefully consider the crucial role the stage has played in shaping perceptions and understandings of race – Blackness, in particular. “From the arrival of the first African slaves on American soil, the discourse on race, the definitions and meanings of blackness, have been intricately linked to issues of theater and performance,” Harry J. Elam, Jr. writes. Part of our task together will be to investigate these linkages and interrogate what they perhaps reveal about the operations of race in modern life.
- Teacher: Isaiah Wooden