Prefiguring Postblackness explores the tensions between cultural
memory of the African American freedom struggle and representations of
African American identity staged in five plays between 1959 and 1969
during the civil rights era. Through close readings of the plays, their
popular and African American print media reviews, and the cultural
context in which they were produced, Carol Bunch Davis shows how these
representations complicate narrow ideas of blackness, which often limit
the freedom struggle era to Martin Luther King�s nonviolent protest and
cast Malcolm X�s black nationalism as undermining the civil rights
movement�s advances.
These five plays strategically revise the rhetoric, representations,
ideologies, and iconography of the African American freedom struggle,
subverting its dominant narrative. This revision critiques racial uplift
ideology�s tenets of civic and moral virtue as a condition of African
American full citizenship. The dramas also reimagine the Black Arts
movement�s restrictive notions of black authenticity as a condition of
racial identity, and their staged representations construct a
counter-narrative to cultural memory of the freedom struggle during that
very era. In their use of a �postblack ethos� to enact African American
subjectivity, the plays envision black identity beyond the quest for
freedom, anticipating what blackness might look like when it moves
beyond the struggle.
The plays under discussion range from the canonical (Lorraine
Hansberry�s A Raisin in the Sun and Amiri Baraka�s Dutchman) to
celebrated, yet understudied works (Alice Childress�s Wine in the
Wilderness, Howard Sackler�s The Great White Hope, and Charles
Gordone�s No Place to Be Somebody). Finally, Davis discusses recent
revivals, showing how these 1960s plays shape dimensions of modern drama
well beyond the decade of their creation.
