To browse Academia. I dedicate this chapter to the inexhaustible memory of poet and playwright, Amiri Baraka The drama of Africans' forceful migration and existence as an internal colony under the control of the dominant white infrastructure in the United States acts as the fundamental backdrop for protest discourse. Largely absent from the examination of this history, and from critiques of subordination within the discipline of performance arts in the United States, is the analysis of the historical roots of protest and its consequent discourse in African American theater.
The purpose of this essay is to trace those roots as they develop on the early twentieth-century stage, how they emerge full force during the s and s, and how they create lasting legacies for contemporary theater. It is likely no accident that traditions of protest discourse in performance art have gone under-studied until recently.
Even the contemporary world sees cultural products, including those originating from counter-cultural ideologies, transmitted to people in ways that fit prescribed roles. The process boils down divergent components into an indistinguishable mass of uniformity, an inferno feeding on negativity and separatism.
In America the history of stereotypes has been advanced with racial intimidation on stage. The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance is an outstanding collection of specially written essays that charts the emergence, development, and diversity of African American Theatre and Performance-from the nineteenth-century African Grove Theatre to Afrofuturism. Alongside chapters from scholars are contributions from theatre makers, including producers, theatre managers, choreographers, directors, designers, and critics.
This ambitious Companion includes: v. This dissertation examines the relationship between African American literature and performance during the modern Civil Rights Movement. It traces the ways in which the movement was acted out on the theatrical stage as creatively as it was at those sites of embodied activism that have survived in intellectual and popular memories: lunch counters and buses, schools and courtrooms, streets and prisons.
