This Has Not Happened: African American Performances at the Edge of the Century
Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
African American Studies
First Advisor
Brooks, Daphne
Abstract
This dissertation articulates a relationship among sociopolitical crisis, speculation, and spectacle that emerges from the fiscal and social conservatism of the 1980s. I argue that, over the last four decades, theater presents a distinctive opportunity to push beyond politics of representation to an embodied mode of speculative thought. By analyzing the impossible longevity that ties together August Wilson’s American Century Cycle (1982-2005), the sonic inscrutability of the black body in Lisa Jones’s and Suzan-Lori Parks’s respective radio dramas Ethnic Cleansing (1993) and Loco-motive (1991), and the layers of transparency and opacity in Jackie Sibblies Drury’s stage plays Really (2016) and Fairview (2018), I trace the ways that black playwrights as well as their collaborators have begun building a grammar of performance-based speculation that challenges restrictive scripts of blackness. I document the possibilities and limitations of how the black body—as a racially, biologically, temporally, socially, and physically circumscribed object—becomes a vehicle for alternate modes of black existence in the past, present, and future. Engaging with a discourse grounded in English literature, African American Studies, and theater and performance studies, I read across genres of performance including the theatrical, sonic, visual, and textual, to explore the diverse strategies that black theater artists use to theorize and perform new visions of black being in the midst of acute crisis. Throughout the dissertation, I aim to situate black speculative performance within a lineage of theatrical tradition and other cultural production that bridges centuries, genres, political projects, and systems of disenfranchisement.
Recommended Citation
Berry, Andie, "This Has Not Happened: African American Performances at the Edge of the Century" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1403.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1403
