Seminar 10:
Truth and Meaning: Documenting the Past in Contemporary African American Theatre Scholarship
Co-Chairs: Sandra Shannon, Heather S. Nathans & John Rogers Harris
Participants and abstracts:
Catherine Trieschman, University of Maryland
Staging Slavery in the Nation’s Capital: Artifact Museums and the Construction of Slavery Narratives
While American museums have historically shied away from depicting
the institution of slavery, a plethora of planning projects have
erupted around the country to build museums memorializing this institution
in the past decade. These proposals range from site-specific projects,
such as the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati,
to more broadly conceived memorials, such as the proposed National
Slavery Museum on the Washington Mall. Yet absent from the public
conversations surrounding these projects is an assessment of how
the narrative of slavery is currently constructed and memorialized
in museums through the performance of artifacts, documents, and memory.
I have chosen three case studies, varied in their geographic locations
and in their funding sources, to investigate how museums in and around
the nation’s capital construct the narrative of slavery. First,
I examine how The Anacostia Museum, Center for African-American History
and Culture (part of the Smithsonian umbrella but located in Anacostia)
assembles artifacts and text-based documents to construct a logo-centric,
linear narrative of slavery. Second, I investigate how the Great
Blacks in Wax Museum (the most frequented museum in Baltimore) employs
memory and ritual to construct a narrative of slavery focused on
violence done to the body. And third, I consider how the Sandy Springs
Slavery Museum and African Art Gallery (founded and funded by Winston
Anderson, a professor of biology at Howard University, who began
the project by building a twenty-five foot replica of a slave ship
in his backyard) employs a combination of “real” artifacts
and “improvised” artifacts to construct a polyvalent
narrative of slavery across the Diaspora. In each study, I analyze
how spatial relationships, both among the assembled artifacts and
between the artifact and the spectator, work to construct historical
narratives, sometimes eliding gaps in documented evidence and sometimes
casting the spectator into the role of historical subject in order
to complete the narrative.
Aaron Bryant, University of Maryland
THE HOLY GHOST, THE SON, AND THE FATHER
A Theory of Syncretism, Inversion, and Cultural Memory in August Wilson’s
King Hedley II
My paper explores “cultural memory” and African religion in August Wilson’s King Hedley II (Hedley). Focusing specifically on the play’s three central male characters Stool Pigeon, King Hedley II, and Elmore as cultural tropes, I will investigate how Wilson “Africanizes” Western religious and cultural symbols, through what I refer as the playwright’s “Sacred Trinity.” Through this Trinity, Wilson seeks a religious “inversion” (as opposed to conversion), where he attempts reconnect African Americans to their cultural traditions by remaking and“inverting” European religious symbols to suit an African cultural history. This concept is not new and is part of black Diaspora cultural history, as African slaves often reinterpreted and concealed their spiritual beliefs behind European holy symbols. In Voodoo and Santería, for example, Yoruba deities were often given the names of Catholic saints, while traditional incantations took the form of songs and prayers. It was through religion and the syncretic guise of Christianity that slaves were able to sustain a“cultural memory” and spiritual connection to Africa. Wilson does something similar in his dramaturgy. The Christian Holy Trinity serves as a basis for my analysis, as I assign Hedley’s primary male characters to the Christian Father, Son, and Holy Ghost prototypes, I also align Wilson’s characters with prototypes from African religious myth that are based on two key Yoruba orishas: Esu-Elegbara and Ogun. Esu-Elegbara appears throughout African-influenced oral and literary traditions. He is the “trickster” character, as well as the“divine linguist” and messenger of the gods. For my paper, I make distinctions between the “trickster” and the “linguist” characteristics by assigning their distinctive traits to two separate divinities. Esu will refer to “the trickster,” while Elegbara represents “the divine linguist.” Ogun is also an important figure in Yoruba culture. He serves as the patron deity of warriors and represents justice and fairness, as well as vengeance when justice is breached. Even today, in Yoruba courtrooms, Ogun’s symbol, the machete or sword, serves as the symbol of truth and justice. Understanding the role of the trickster, the warrior hero, and the divine messenger in African mythology offers insight into the subtext of Wilson’s dramaturgy. Additionally, Wilson’s theater offers audiences opportunities to connect to performance as documenting important aspects of black Diasporic cultural history. My paper, therefore, approaches King Hedley II as a medium for discussing the relationships between “knowing the past,” “performing the past,” and “theorizing the past.”
I have included a matrix outlining my theory of Wilson’s Holy Trinity below:
| Christian Trinity Wilson’s Characters Mythical Function | |
| Yoruba Trinity | |
| Father Elmore | |
| Trickster Esu | |
| Son King Hedley II Warrior | |
| Hero Ogun | |
| Holy Ghost Stool Pigeon Divine | |
| Linguist Elegbara |
To help explicate my thesis, I will also discuss how this theory applies to other literature and drama like James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. My paper also raises questions that are central to conference discussions, including:
- How is memory performed in unique ways in African American theatre, and do those performances constitute their own kinds of “documents?”
- How has the expansion of scholarship in the field of Diaspora Studies changed the way in which we now think about African American theatre history and how do we document the history in a transatlantic or transnational context?
- What is evidence and how has critical theory changed traditional rules of evidence?
- What constitutes a document and what is the relationship between
document and discourse?
Faedra Carpenter, Stanford University
Reading Between the Lines: Intertextuality and the Documentation of African American Theatre History
When James Hatch "lamented about the dearth of primary documents that pertained to African American theatre history," his concerns referenced the erasures and prejudice that has long haunted the formal documentation (or lack thereof) of the African American experience. Fortunately, African American theatre history is among the many fields within the African American experience that is finally undergoing a process of rigorous excavation and reconstruction. Although this reclamation is of the highest importance, as theatre scholars and artists, it is also critical for us to recognize the archival properties that can be found between the lines of far less elusive texts, namely, the playscripts themselves. Advocating an introspective interrogation of the African American dramatic canon—and following the Signifyin(g) theories of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.—this paper explores how intertextuality plays a unique role in the documentation of African American theatre history. Through the "Call and Response" aesthetic of intertextuality, this paper reveals how contemporary African American playwrights chronicle the evolution of the African American dramatic canon and document the trajectory of African American history by galvanizing the performance of memory. Offering an analysis of the intertextual relationships between works such as LeRoi Jones' Dutchman (1964) and Pearl Cleage's Bourbon at the Border (1997); Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964) and Talvin Wilks' Tod, the boy, Tod (1990) and Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow was enuf (1976) and Keith Antar Mason's for black boys who have considered homicide when the streets were too much (1993), this paper wrestles with the following questions: What constitutes a "primary" archival document in the study of theatre history and what determines its qualitative value? Should we consider the plays themselves as authoritative texts and does the study of these documents address concerns regarding "authenticity" and/or "legitimate" scholarship? How definitive is the relationship between the texts in question and why does this relationship qualify as performative? How does intertextuality document the performance of memory in African American theatre history and how should it inform the teaching of African American dramatic literature courses?Corey Roberts, University of Maryland
Voodoo Macbeth: A Case Study in the African Diasporic Revision of Theatre History
On April 14, 1936 Voodoo Macbeth, a hybrid of African cosmological and ritual elements (the work of Asadata Dafora and his drum ensemble) and Western creative genius (most notably the writing and directorial work of Orson Welles), captivated black and white audience members with its array of musical and visual spectacle in the halls of Harlem's Lafayette Theatre. While most critics were impressed,. New York Herald Tribune critic Percy Hammond was a more difficult theatergoer to impress. He chose to write a scathing, racist review that may not have offended some of the American cast members, but did disrupt the African drummers' process such that they enacted a ritual of redress to correct the break in the ceremony. The redressive ceremony purportedly caused Hammond to fall ill the next day and die a week later. All documentation of these events has thus far been pulled from the journals of John Houseman (the show's producer) and Orson Welles. In this paper, the particular practice enacted by the drummers is searched for utilizing African Diasporic methodology (including sociology, ethnography, ritual studies, and cultural anthropology) with the end goal of looking through the veil of exoticism to elucidate the ritual elements of this production
Peter Civetta, Cornell University
The Performance of Preaching – A New Source of African American Performance Documentation
This paper deals with a major untapped source of African American performance – preaching.
There are many connections to be made between African American preaching
styles and African American theatrical traditions, and a recent burst of
scholarship in African American homiletics, both historical and contemporary,
has yet to get connected to theatre scholarship. This paper seeks to begin
such a dialogue with an exploration of two antebellum sermons by John Jasper
and J.W.C. Pennington.
The subject of Jasper’s sermon concerns the backward movement of the
sun, literally, due to the will of God. Jasper was both honored and reviled
for this sermon, which he preached upon request for many years. Many educated
Blacks felt embarrassed by his lack of intellectualism while many Whites laughed
at the ignorant man’s foolishness. However, a crucial context for the
sermon lies dormant if read solely for this explicit content. Jasper first
delivered this sermon while a slave living on a plantation. To discuss any
issues of import to his congregation would necessitate veiling his thoughts.
Taken in this context, Jasper’s sermon becomes about identity construction
and the performance of knowledge.
Delivered in 1845 in Hartford, Connecticut, Pennington’s sermon concerns
whether biblical justification of slavery exists. In a climate where Christians
defended the practice as consistent with Scripture, Pennington directly interrogates
this claim and the Bible itself. “If I am deceived here – if the
word of God does sanction slavery, I want another book, another repentance,
another faith, and another hope!” With this performative initiative,
Pennington is willing to completely abandon God and the Bible, instead seeking
a new performance from this oldest of documents.
The preached sermon remains an acutely overlooked aspect of cultural discourse.
Throughout history the power of the pulpit has influenced public policy and
social standards. Preachers emerge as apologists as well as combatants to
many of society’s ills, yet their role in these moments of history
remains under-examined. Through exploring this new documentary font of preaching,
theatre studies, and African American theatrical traditions in particular,
will be enormously expanded.
Rhonda Justice-Malloy, Central Michigan University
August Wilson's History: Toward a Theory of Imagination
Roscoe Lee Brown, who performed in Joe Turner's Come and Gone and Two Trains Running has said of August Wilson: "He plumbs the psyche as surely as any of the great dramatists and he knows how to summon up race memories that make you whole." Wilson's charge has been to write a play for each decade of the twentieth-century documenting the African-American experience. With the completion of Gem of the Ocean, he is only one decade shy of accomplishing his goal. He describes the project as "the dramatic tracing of the black American odyssey." Indeed, he says, "I take the entire black experience in America, from the first black in 1619 until now, and claim that as my material. That's my story, my life story, and that's a lot to write about. When the first African died on the continent of North America, that was the beginning of my history." Yet, Wilson is not an autobiographical writer, nor is he a traditional writer of history. Wilson does not research his subjects but rather listens to blues recordings or ponders the collage paintings of Romare Bearden and waits for his characters to speak to him, tapping into what he calls "the blood's memory, that deepest part of yourself where the ancestors are talking." Using recent discourse on the function of imagination and cognitive theory, I will argue that Wilson's body of work obtains as a construction of social history for the twenty-first century not because of any historical accuracy regarding the last century. Rather Wilson uses "imagination" rather than fact as a structuring activity of social knowledge for this century. Most of us tend to think of drama and theatre as the product of artistic genius, creativity and shared imagination. And for most people the word"imagination" connotes artistic creativity, fantasy, invention, and novelty, though not necessarily historical accuracy or factual knowledge. This marriage of imagination, creativity, fantasy and the unreal is chiefly the result of nineteenth-century Romantic views of art and imagination that have strongly influenced our common understanding, especially of our concept of theatre Contemporary cognitive science and philosophy have entered into argument denouncing such "Platonic" prejudice against imagination which is based on the claim that no true knowledge can rest on either sense experience or, even worse, upon images of things. Philosophers of cognitive science recognize imagination as having an informing influence on human cognition. As Mark Johnson has written, "Imagination is a pervasive structuring activity by means of which we achieve coherent, patterned, unified representations. It is indispensable for our ability to make sense of our experience, to make it meaningful."In light of this philosophy of cognition we are encouraged toward a reassessment of the role of imagination and the construction of human social history. As Johnson writes, "We need to explore the role of imagination…in meaning, understanding, reasoning, and communication. Only in this way can we begin to understand how it is possible for us to 'have a world' that we can make sense of and reason about." This paper will argue that imagination is the very real, unifying structure of our consciousness that constitutes the ultimate conditions for our being able to create and experience theatre as social history. Rather than enumerating Wilson's use of metaphor and metonymy to create a kind of historical drama, this paper will explore Wilson's use of image and imagination (by this I mean the act of imaging) in his very process of creating plays that create a social history for the twenty-first century.
Ashley Lucas, University of California, San Diego
Abstract: The Role of History in Selected Plays of Suzan-Lori Parks: Venus and The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World
African American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks has written a body of plays about the social history of blackness and black people. Her characters, both black and non-black, grapple with the constructions and meanings of race in the telling of history. Much of Parks’ work is based on figures from written history, folkloric history, and literature. She uses familiar signifiers of blackness to interrogate the authors of history and the naturalization of the racial and gendered paradigms set up by colonialism. In doing so, she critiques the acceptance of written historical accounts as the whole truth and offers a counter-narrative to the familiar versions of the past. This critique is exemplified by two of her powerful plays: Venus and The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World. Both plays use restrictions placed on mobility and the recording of one’s own history as a means to identify oppressive racial and gender roles.
Nathaniel Nesmith, Columbia University
Theories are not only vital to any field or discipline; they are essential
to signify that something or someone existed. Craig, Meyerhold, Goethe, Corneille,
Brecht, Artaud, and Lope de Vega are several theatre artists whose theatre
theories are well established. Aristotle's Poetics is required reading for
high school and college students. Theories originate from trying to synthesize
a practical approach to solve a problem. In most instances, theories evolved
from a particular culture or a particular time; and those theories will provide
the impetus for changes. Such is the case of the dramatic theories that came
out of the Harlem Renaissance (when I speak of the Harlem Renaissance, I refer
to the period 1920-1930). In 1922, Carter Woodson advocated the development
of black drama, stressing that African Americans had to write their own literature.
In 1928, James Weldon Johnson echoed similar sentiments for black dramatists.
In 1922, Alain Locke and W. E. B. Du Bois agreed on the importance of developing
the African-American drama. Marcus Garvey wrote about theatre and had his own
ideas of what black theatre should be. In addition, Du Bois used Crisis magazine
to promote the use of the stage for propaganda purposes. Willis Richardson,
the first African American to have a non-musical play produced on Broadway,
pleaded for the development of the "Negro Drama." The aforementioned
are only several of the significant African American intellectuals and artists
who wrote about the importance of African American drama during the Harlem
Renaissance. While there has been a tremendous amount of scholarly focus on
African American fiction of the Harlem Renaissance, there has not been nearly
enough focus on the drama of that period or the theories. This paper addresses
this gap by examining theatre-related articles, essays and editorials in four
of the most significant publications [The Crisis, Opportunity, The Messenger,
and Negro World] of the Harlem Renaissance that were directed to African American
readers.
Cheryl Black, University of Missouri
The Truly Lost Plays of the Harlem Renaissance....?
This proposal addresses lack of documentation of plays written and produced
primarily for racially specific theatres and audiences during the very fertile
era of the Harlem Renaissance/New Negro era, the 20s, 30s, and early 40s. Despite
the tremendous efforts of scholars like Hatch, Shine, Perkins, Stephens, Brown-Guillory,
et al - my recent diggings into archival sources [newspapers, correspondence,
programs, etc.] has yielded intriguing titles and notices of plays still unpublished
that seem to have had considerable popular appeal [for example, Carlton Moss'
Harlem Beauty Shoppe and Rose McClendon and Bruce Nugent's Taxi Fare]. This
preliminary foray suggests that our view of Negro Little Theatre repertories
amd audiences may be somewhat skewed, that retrieveal of some of these works
may be of considerable interest/import , and that the project of retrieval
may require more creative avenues than copyright searches at the Library of
Congress.
Brandi Wilkins Catanese, University of California at Berkeley
Abstract Title: Embodied Knowledge and the Performance of African American (Theater) History
My paper addresses the interesting practice in contemporary African American
drama of using performance as a conceit for retaining, documenting, and exposing
the continuities between the historical past and the present of African American
experience. Taking Robert O’Hara’s Insurrection: Holding History,
Suzan-Lori Parks’ The America Play, and George C. Wolfe’s The Colored
Museum as my exemplary texts, I examine the ways in which the act of performance
at once transmits and transmutes the relationship between a historicized African
American subjectivity and the theater. From O’Hara’s time travel
which situates his protagonist within and provides him with a physical sensitivity
to slavery to Parks’ re-enactment of the trauma of racial strife in the
United States to the introductory monologue of Wolfe’s Colored Museum,
which invites/incites audience participation in a satiric reenactment of the
Middle Passage, contemporary African American writers are distending the empirical/philosophical
time line and offering history as embodied knowledge to both performers and
audience members in a way that supplants the primacy of traditional historiography.
These performances all implicate theater in the creation of African American
history, and implicate performance in the development and articulation of blackness
as a historically contingent cultural sensibility.
Taken collectively, these writers exploit the multiple intersections of performance
as history, performance of history, and performativity of history to grant
extra-textual validity to the live body and its ability to gain access to buried
knowledge, creating a community of cultural preservationists that exists precisely
in the spaces between text and theatrical moment, granting the act of performance
a psychic permanence that affirms African American experience through alternate
methods. The permanence of African American theater (as) history resides in
the act of realization: both the performance of contemporary work and the resurrection
of older texts (through such production processes as dramaturgy and theatrical
realization) render the past constantly valuable and available in the present,
and restore history as an ethical enterprise in which entire communities are
implicated in the mechanisms of validation that give lasting currency to narratives
of black experience within Americas multiple social stages.
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