01:30 PM to 02:45 PM MW
Thompson Hall L004
Section Information for Fall 2020
We will read and examine several plays written from the beginning of the twentieth century through the present, as well as secondary readings devoted to specific plays and to cardinal moments in the evolution of African American drama. The course will focus on plays written and performed since the 1980s, though we will begin with early “agit-prop” and folk plays of the 1910s and 1920s and also read the most renowned play in the African American dramatic canon. Moreover, we will explore how contemporary playwrights have expanded the contours of the African American dramatic landscape, addressing complex issues related black feminism, constructions of masculinity, black “authenticity” and essentialized notions of race/gender, and gay/lesbian subject formation in a culture often concomitantly “Negrophobic” and homophobic. Dramatists whose works we will examine include: Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, Adrienne Kennedy, Charles Fuller, August Wilson, Pearl Cleage, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Lynn Nottage.
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Credits: 3
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