Black Women Playwrights

Visions on the American Stage

Carol P. Marsh-Lockett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317944935
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection of critical essays on plays by African American female playwrights from the post-reconstruction period to the present provides thematic analyses of plays by major and less widely known African American women playwrights The contributors examine the plays as vehicles of public discourse, and as explorations of issues of African American identity. Essays explore the themes of sexuality, agency, anger, and self-concept in the plays of African American Women.

Index

Abrams, Roger, 92–93

Abramson, Doris, 129n.3

Africa, 57

African American:

community, 11

life, 10

male agency, 11

selfhood, 11

sexuality, 11; 155–172; 173–192; 193–211

subjectivity, 90

woman as whore, 11 women and anger, 43–54

Akbar, Na’im, 9

American Negro Theater Company, 125

Anderson, Mary Louise, 149n.4

anti-lynching dramas, 25–42

anti-miscegenation laws, 142

Asante, Molefi, 9

Austin, Gayle, 152n.19

Baker, Houston, 108

Baldwin, James, 4; 80

Bambara, Toni Cade, 121

Baraka, Amiri, 87–88; 174

Baraka, Imamu, 4

See also Baraka, Amiri

Barnett, Ida B. Wells, 26 Bhaba, Homi, 16

Berzon, Judith, 150n.7

Birth of a Nation, 74

black male subjectivity, 87–111

black selfhood, 131–153

black theater, 128

Bonner, Marita, 7

Booth, Wayne, 149n.6

Boston Herald, 4

Boucicault, Dion, 15

Bradford, Joseph B., 22

Broadway Rastus, 84

Brown decision, 127

Brown, Janet, 151n.17

Brown, William, Wells, 4; 84n.6

Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth, 5; 123; 128n.1; 145; 150n.5

Burrill, Mary P., 28–29; 30; 30; 35; 39; 40; 161–162

Cane, 192

Capouya, Emile, 80

Carby, Hazel, 44–45; 150n....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Critical Introduction Other Scribbling Women: African American Female Dramatists
• Remaking the Minstrel: Pauline Hopkins’s Peculiar Sam and the Post-Reconstruction Black Subject
• Before the Strength, the Pain: Portraits of Elderly Black Women in Early Twentieth-Century Anti-Lynching Plays
• Segregated Sisterhood: Anger, Racism, and Feminism in Alice Childress’s Florence and Wedding Band
• “Sicker than a rabid dog”: African American Women Playwrights Look at War
• Mara, Angelina Grimké’s Other Play and the Problems of Recovering Texts
• Black Male Subjectivity Deferred?: The Quest for Voice and Authority in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun
• The Desire/Authority Nexus in Contemporary African American Women’s Drama
• Celebrating the (Extra)Ordinary: Alice Childress’s Representation of Black Selfhood
• The Discourse of Intercourse: Sexuality and Eroticism in African American Women’s Drama
• The Nightmare of History: Conceptions of Sexuality in Adrienne Kennedy’s Funny house of a Negro
• “Filled with the Holy Ghost”: Sexual Dimension and Dimensions of Sexuality in the Theater of Ntozake Shange
• Selected Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index