First-Year Writing Seminar: Race and History in Contemporary American Theatre

Catalog description

The Hamilton craze has swept the country, and with it, a renewed interest in how American history is taught, used, and twisted on the American stage. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s vision of placing race at the center of American history has sparked particular interest and heated discussion. While Hamilton may be the best-known version of this phenomenon, it is by no means its only example. Indeed, race—its performance, its abstraction, its stereotyping, or its silencing—has always been a topic of conversation on American stages, especially in the performance and shaping of American history. In the last nine years alone, there have been more than 18 new shows asking these kinds of questions. This course proposes to examine what role race has played in the performance of American history as well as how American history has been portrayed in contemporary theatre. We will read plays along with historical and theoretical texts and view performances and other visual media. Students will write 3-4 essays that use evidence from works on the syllabus to make original arguments in clear analytic prose.