The Performance of Black Masculinity in Contemporary Black Drama PDF Download

Author: John Rogers Harris
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African American men in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Author: DeRon S. Williams
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135025293X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
How are Black artists, activists, and pedagogues wielding acts of rebellion, activism, and solidarity to precipitate change? How have contemporary performances impacted Black cultural, social, and political struggles? What are the ways in which these acts and artists engage varied Black identities and explore shared histories? Contemporary Black Theatre and Performance investigates these questions to illuminate the relationship between performance, identity, intersectionality, and activism in North America and beyond. It features contributions from scholars, artists, and activists from across disciplines who explore the nuances and varied forms of Black performance in the 21st century while incorporating performance-based methodologies and queer and black feminist theories. Among the many topics addressed by contributors are antiracist pedagogy, Black queer identity formation in Black playwriting, digital blackface, and Black women's subversive practices within contemporary popular culture. It encompasses dramatic analysis of Lynn Nottage's Sweat, Tarell Alvin McCraney's Choir Boy, and acts of resistance during the Black Lives Matter summer 2020 highway protests. A series of conversations with artists and scholars are woven throughout the book's three sections, including with playwrights Christina Anderson and Donja R. Love, and Willa Taylor, Director of Education and Community Engagement at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago.

Author: Rashida Z. Shaw McMahon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351401629
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
The Black Circuit: Race, Performance, and Spectatorship in Black Popular Theatre presents the first book-length study of Chitlin Circuit theatre, the most popular and controversial form of Black theatre to exist outside the purview of Broadway since the 1980s. Through historical and sociological research, Rashida Z. Shaw McMahon links the fraught racial histories in American slave plantations and early African American cuisine to the performance sites of nineteenth-century minstrelsy, early-twentieth-century vaudeville, and mid-twentieth-century gospel musicals. The Black Circuit traces this rise of a Black theatrical popular culture that exemplifies W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1926 parameters of "for us, near us, by us, and about us," with critical differences that, McMahon argues, complicate our understanding of performance and spectatorship in African American theatre. McMahon shows how an integrated and evolving network of consumerism, culture, circulation, exchange, ideologies, and meaning making has emerged in the performance environments of Chitlin Circuit theatre that is reflective of the broader influences at play in acts of minority spectatorship. She labels this network the Black Circuit.

Author: Keith Clark
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252026768
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Demonstrating the extraordinary versatility of African-American men's writing since the 1970s, this forceful collection illustrates how African-American male novelists and playwrights have absorbed, challenged, and expanded the conventions of black American writing and, with it, black male identity. From the "John Henry Syndrome"--a definition of black masculinity based on brute strength or violence--to the submersion of black gay identity under equations of gay with white and black with straight, the African-American male in literature and drama has traditionally been characterized in ways that confine and silence him. Contemporary Black Men's Fiction and Drama identifies the forces that limit black male discourse, including traditions established by iconic African-American male authors such as James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. This thoughtful volume also shows how contemporary black male authors use their narratives to put forward new ways of being and knowing that foster a more complete sense of self and more humane and open ways of communicating with and relating to others. In the work of Charles Johnson, Ernest Gaines, and August Wilson, contributors find paths toward broader, less rigid ideas of what black literature can be, what the connections among individual and communal resistance can be, and how black men can transcend the imprisoning models of hyper masculinity promoted by American culture. Seeking greater spiritual connection with the past, John Edgar Wideman returns to the folk rituals of his family, while Melvin Dixon and Brent Wade reclaim African roots and traditions. Ishmael Reed struggles with a contemporary cultural oppression that he sees as an insidious echo of slavery, while Clarence Major's experimental writing suggests how black men might reclaim their own voices in a culture that silences them. Taking in a wide range of critical, theoretical, cultural, gender, and sexual concerns, Contemporary Black Men's Fiction and Drama provides provocative new readings of a broad range of contemporary writers.

Author: Carla J. McDonough
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786427361
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
The men in plays such as Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman or Sam Shephard's True West are often presented as universal; little attention is given to the gender dynamics involved in the characters. This work looks at how contemporary playwrights, including Miller, Shepard, Eugene O'Neill, David Mamet, and August Wilson, stage masculinity in their works. It becomes apparent that male playwrights return often to the issues of troubled manhood, usually masked in other issues such as war, business or family. The plays indicate both the attractiveness of the model of traditional masculinity and the illusive nature of this image, which all too often fractures and fails the characters who pursue it. O'Neill's play The Hairy Ape and the character Yank receive much attention.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Dissertations, Academic
Languages : en
Pages : 640

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Book Description
Abstracts of dissertations available on microfilm or as xerographic reproductions.

Author: Bryant Keith Alexander
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
ISBN: 9780759109292
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Presents linked essays on the African American male experience.

Author: L. Goddard
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137493100
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
This book examines the socio-political and theatrical conditions that heralded the shift from the margins to the mainstream for black British Writers, through analysis of the social issues portrayed in plays by Kwame Kwei-Armah, debbie tucker green, Roy Williams, and Bola Agbaje.

Author:
Publisher: Samuel French, Inc.
ISBN: 9780573694790
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 76

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Book Description
An African American preacher returns to his hometown to open a church, outwitting a segregationist plantation owner to make it happen.

Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1604133937
Category : African Americans in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Presents a brief biography of August Wilson along with extracts of major critical essays, plot summaries, and an index of themes and ideas.