THE 220: African American Drama (Watkins)

Signaling such recent activist and aesthetic concepts in the work of Kara Walker, Childish Gambino, BLM, Janelle Monáe, and Kendrick Lamar, and marking the exit of the Obama Administration and the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, this anthology explores the role of African American arts in shaping the future, and further informing new directions we might take in honoring and protecting the success of African Americans in the U.S. The essays in African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity engage readers in critical conversations by activists, scholars, and artists reflecting on national and transnational legacies of African American activism as an element of artistic practice, particularly as they concern artistic expression and race relations, and the intersections of creative processes with economic, sociological, and psychological inequalities. Scholars from the fields of communication, theater, queer studies, media studies, performance studies, dance, visual arts, and fashion design, to name a few, collectively ask: What are the connections between African American arts, the work of social justice, and creative processes? If we conceive the arts as critical to the legacy of Black activism in the United States, how can we use that construct to inform our understanding of the complicated intersections of African American activism and aesthetics? How might we as scholars and creative thinkers further employ the arts to envision and shape a verdant society? Contributors: Carrie Mae Weems, Carmen Gillespie, Rikki Byrd, Amber Lauren Johnson, Doria E. Charlson, Florencia V. Cornet, Daniel McNeil, Lucy Caplan, Genevieve Hyacinthe, Sammantha McCalla, Nettrice R. Gaskins, Abby Dobson, J. Michael Kinsey, Shondrika Moss-Bouldin, Julie B. Johnson, Sharrell D. Luckett, Jasmine Eileen Coles, Tawnya Pettiford-Wates, Rickerby Hinds. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. 

African American Political Thought offers an unprecedented philosophical history of thinkers from the African American community and African diaspora who have addressed the central issues of political life: democracy, race, violence, liberation, solidarity, and mass political action. Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner have brought together leading scholars to reflect on individual intellectuals from the past four centuries, developing their list with an expansive approach to political expression. The collected essays consider such figures as Martin Delany, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois,  James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Audre Lorde, whose works are addressed by scholars such as Farah Jasmin Griffin, Robert Gooding-Williams, Michael Dawson, Nick Bromell, Neil Roberts, and Lawrie Balfour. While African American political thought is inextricable from the historical movement of American political thought, this volume stresses the individuality of Black thinkers, the transnational and diasporic consciousness, and how individual speakers and writers draw on various traditions simultaneously to broaden our conception of African American political ideas.  This landmark volume gives us the opportunity to tap into the myriad and nuanced political theories central to Black life. In doing so, African American Political Thought: A Collected History transforms how we understand the past and future of political thinking in the West.  

In tracing black feminism in contemporary drama authored by black women, Lisa M. Anderson analyzes plays by Pearl Cleage, Glenda Dickerson, Breena Clarke, Kia Corthron, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sharon Bridgforth, and Shirlene Holmes. Representing a cross section of women who have diverse writing and performance styles and generational differences, Black Feminism in Contemporary Drama highlights the artistic and political breadth of black feminist theater. While investigating the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation in twenty-first-century plays, Anderson provides a historical overview of the development of black feminism--in drama, poetry, and fiction--since the nineteenth century. Whether then or now, black feminism has engaged with issues such as rape, social justice, victimization, abortion, stereotyping, racism, and violence. This enlightening study of modern black feminist theatre aesthetic not only discusses what shapes the black feminism of these playwrights but also points out how the meaning of the term black feminism shifts among them. In constructing this aesthetic, Anderson examines current issues such as welfare, lesbianism, teen pregnancy, and gang violence. Anderson's analysis also includes a close investigation of each play's creation and the context of its production, including how the play critiques, shifts, or alters dominant culture stereotypes; how it positions goals of the "community"; and how it engages with the concept of art's function.

Focusing on the making of African American society from the 1896 "separate but equal" ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson up to the contemporary period, this encyclopedia traces the transition from the Reconstruction Era to the age of Jim Crow, the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Migration, the Brownruling that overturned Plessy, the Civil Rights Movement, and the ascendant influence of African American culture on the American cultural landscape.Covering African American history in all areas of U.S. history and culture from 1896 to the present, the Encyclopedia contains approximately 1,200 fully cross-referenced entries that are all signed by leading scholars and experts, making this five-volume set the most reliable and extensive treatmentto be found on African American history in the twentieth century. The set also contains 500 images and roughly 640 biographies, as well as an entry on each of the fifty states. In addition to its comprehensive coverage of African Americans, the Encyclopedia also contains entries about key figureswho affected the lives of African Americans in particular and Americans in general. Unrivalled in breadth and scope, this is the preeminent source of information on this topic and is destined to become a trusted reference source for years to come.

This second edition of Historical Dictionary of African American Theater reflects the rich history and representation of the black aesthetic and the significance of African American theater's history, fleeting present, and promise to the future. It celebrates nearly 200 years of black theater in the United States and the thousands of black theater artists across the country--identifying representative black theaters, playwrights, plays, actors, directors, and designers and chronicling their contributions to the field from the birth of black theater in 1816 to the present. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of African American Theater, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries on actors, playwrights, plays, musicals, theatres, -directors, and designers. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know and more about African American Theater.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., gives us a sumptuously illustrated landmark book tracing African American history from the arrival of the conquistadors to the election of Barack Obama. Informed by the latest, sometimes provocative scholarship and including more than seven hundred images--ancient maps, fine art, documents, photographs, cartoons, posters--Life Upon These Shores focuses on defining events, debates, and controversies, as well as the signal achievements of people famous and obscure. Gates takes us from the sixteenth century through the ordeal of slavery, from the Civil War and Reconstruction through the Jim Crow era and the Great Migration; from the civil rights and black nationalist movements through the age of hip-hop to the Joshua generation. By documenting and illuminating the sheer diversity of African American involvement in American history, society, politics, and culture, Gates bracingly disabuses us of the presumption of a single "black experience." Life Upon These Shores is a book of major importance, a breathtaking tour de force of the historical imagination.

Here indeed is the pantheon of African American writers--Phillis Wheatley and Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois, Gwendolyn Brooks and Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, John EdgarWideman and August Wilson, Jamaica Kincaid and Gloria Naylor, Stanley Crouch and Cornel West, and hundreds more. Moreover, the Companion includes entries on 150 major works of African American literature (including synopses of novels), from Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,Richard Wright's Native Son, to Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun; on literary characters, ranging from Bigger Thomas, to Coffin Ed Johnson, Kunta Kinte, Sula Peace; on character types, such as Aunt Jemima, Brer Rabbit, John Henry, Stackolee, and the trickster; and on such icons of blackculture as Muhammad Ali, John Coltrane, Marcus Garvey, Jackie Robinson, John Brown, and Harriet Tubman. Here, too, are general articles on the traditional literary genres, such as poetry, fiction, and drama; on genres of special import in African American letters, such as autobiography, slavenarratives, Sunday School literature, and oratory; and on a wide spectrum of related topics, including journalism, the black periodical press, major libraries and research centers, religion, literary societies, women's clubs, and various publishing enterprises.

Penumbra Theatre Company was founded in 1976 by Lou Bellamy as a venue for African American voices within the Twin Cities theatre scene and has stood at the intersection of art, culture, politics, and local community engagement ever since. Based on interviews with actors, directors, playwrights, and critics, this book offers a multifaceted view of the theatre and its evolution.