Selected Topics in Theatre and Performance: New Black American Drama (1940-2020)

Catalog description

New Black American Drama (1940-2020) surveys modern and contemporary works by Black playwrights and critical theorists. The course investigates how drama and theatrical performance influence the relationship between American public(s) and articulations and embodied experiences of race and racism. We will explore the strategies that playwrights use to represent, categorize, know, and speak of and for racialized subjects. In this course, we will attend closely to primary texts. It is important to be able to speak about a text—ideas it expresses, how it is structured, its relationship to other texts within its genre or form, its relationship to historical events, its material history—with precision and concision. We will engage with texts through weekly seminar discussions, critical readings, and—perhaps—short written assignments.