Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A Casebook

by Kolin; Philip C.

• ISBN13: 9780415978262
• ISBN10: 0415978262
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-12-27
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

'For students and scholars of American theatre and drama generally and African American theatre and drama most particularly, this is an extremely valuable critical source.' - Harry Elam, Stanford University In the last fifty years, American and World theatre has been challenged and enriched by the rise to prominence of numerous female African American dramatists. Contemporary African American Women Playwrights is the first critical volume to explore the contexts and influences of these writers, and their exploration of black history and identity through a wealth of diverse, courageous and visionary dramas. Kolin compiles a wealth of new essays, comprising: Yale scholar David Krasner on the dramatic legacy of Lorraine Hansberry, Zora Neale Hurston, Marita Bonner and Georgia Douglas Johnson individual chapters devoted to: Alice Childress, Sonia Sanchez, AdrienneKennedy, Ntozake Shange, Pearl Cleage, Aishah Rahman, Glenda Dickerson, Anna Deavere Smith and Suzan Lori-Parks an essay and accompanying interview with Lynn Nottage comprehensive discussion of attendant theatrical forms, from choreopoems and surrealistic plays, to documentary theatre and civil rights dramas, and their use in challenging racial and gender hierarchies. Contributors : Brandi Wilkins Catanese, Soyica Diggs, James Fisher, Freda Scott Giles, Joan Wylie Hall, Philip C. Kolin, David Krasner, Sandra G. Shannon, Debby Thompson, Beth Turner and Jacqueline Wood.

Author Biography

Philip C. Kolin is Professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. He is a widely published poet and academic, whose works include Understanding Adrienne Kennedy, Othello: New Critical Essays (Routledge 2002), and The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia. He was the founding coeditor of Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present.

Table of Contents

General Editor's note	p. vii
Notes on contributors	p. viii
Acknowledgments	p. x
Introduction: The struggles and triumphs of staging gender and race in contemporary African American playwrights	p. 1
"Something's going on down here that concerns me": Johnson, Hurston, Bonner, and Hansberry	p. 9
Dialectical dialogues: Performing blackness in the drama of Alice Childress	p. 28
"Shaking loose": Sonia Sanchez's militant drama	p. 47
American history/African nightmare: Adrienne Kennedy and civil rights	p. 62
"Boogie woogie landscapes": The dramatic/poetic collage of Ntozake Shange	p. 83
The feminist/womanist vision of Pearl Cleage	p. 99
"We must keep on writing": The plays of Aishah Rahman	p. 115
Glenda Dickerson's Nu Shu: Combining feminist discourse/pedagogy/theatre	p. 132
"Everybody's talking": Anna Deavere Smith's documentary theatre	p. 150
Digging the Fo'-fathers: Suzan-Lori Parks's histories	p. 167
An intimate look at the plays of Lynn Nottage	p. 185
An interview with Lynn Nottage	p. 194
Index	p. 202
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