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Full-Text Articles in African American Studies

Sisters In Motherhood(?): The Politics Of Race And Gender In Lynching Drama, Koritha Mitchell Nov 2011

Sisters In Motherhood(?): The Politics Of Race And Gender In Lynching Drama, Koritha Mitchell

Koritha Mitchell

Chapter analyzing May Miller's Nails and Thorns, a lynching play not discussed in my book LIVING WITH LYNCHING.


State Killing, The Stage Of Innocence, And The Exonerated, Katy Ryan Feb 2011

State Killing, The Stage Of Innocence, And The Exonerated, Katy Ryan

Katy Ryan

This essay considers the innocence argument and sentimentality in Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen’s The Exonerated (2003), a documentary play based on interviews with people sentenced to die for crimes they had not committed. The play’s composition, performance, and reception reveal the challenges of art committed to social reform and confirm the difficulty in assessing the political function or, in Fredric Jameson’s sense, the political unconscious of American literature. As a celebrated example of political theatre, The Exonerated also provides a forum for thinking through the contemporary terms and framework of conversations about state killing. The play promotes reform and …


Compulsory Homosexuality And Black Masculine Performance, Vershawn A. Young Jan 2011

Compulsory Homosexuality And Black Masculine Performance, Vershawn A. Young

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Performance Review Of By Hands Unknown, Koritha Mitchell Jan 2011

Performance Review Of By Hands Unknown, Koritha Mitchell

Koritha Mitchell

Performance Review of BY HANDS UNKNOWN, theatrical presentation composed of 7 one-act lynching plays from the 1920s and 1930s.


The Angel And The Imp: The Duncan Sisters’ Performances Of Race And Gender, Jocelyn Buckner Jan 2011

The Angel And The Imp: The Duncan Sisters’ Performances Of Race And Gender, Jocelyn Buckner

Theatre Faculty Articles and Research

From 1923 to 1959 Vivian and Rosetta Duncan performed the show Topsy and Eva in front of thousands of audiences in the United States and abroad. This essay examines how the Duncan Sisters’ appropriation of blackness through a yin and yang performance of black and white womanhood, their sexualized but ultimately infantilizing routine as young girls, and their take on anarchistic comedy resulted in a particular spin on age, gender, race, and sexuality that reinforced their privilege as white women even while it pushed the boundaries of acceptable femininity in the swiftly shifting American culture of the first half of …


Shifting Blackness: How The Arts Revolutionize Black Identity In The Postmodern West, Reginald Eldridge Jr Jan 2011

Shifting Blackness: How The Arts Revolutionize Black Identity In The Postmodern West, Reginald Eldridge Jr

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The contemporary experiences of racially marginalized people in the West are affected deeply by the hegemonic capitalist Orthodox cultural codes, or episteme, in which blackness operates as the symbol of Chaos. As it relates to people of African descent, these affects are marked by a denial of the black person's full status as an unproblematic subject, by ontological voids arising from the practice of enslavement over the past centuries, and by problems of representation within the West, where examples and points of reference for black identity are always tied up with conflicting interests.

Utilizing Sylvia Wynter's model of the Ceremony …


Writing With Paint, Harvey Young Dec 2010

Writing With Paint, Harvey Young

Harvey Young

No abstract provided.