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Full-Text Articles in African American Studies
State Killing, The Stage Of Innocence, And The Exonerated, Katy Ryan
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 …
What Child Is This?: Closely Reading Collectivity And Queer Childrearing In Lackawanna Blues And Noah’S Arc, Vincent L. Stephens
What Child Is This?: Closely Reading Collectivity And Queer Childrearing In Lackawanna Blues And Noah’S Arc, Vincent L. Stephens
Vincent L Stephens
Increasing hostilities toward intimate change are rooted in longstanding affective investments in a sexual normativity that oppresses multiple strands of intimacy, including African American kinship networks and same-sex coupling. Since homosexuality is always racialized sexuality and African American kinship patterns have always been marginal by U. S. heteronormative standards, the present essay unmasks the ways sexual normativity has obscured collectivity as a resistive strategy in the lives of two "alternative" intimate groups with important overlaps, black gay and lesbian communities and African American extended families. The essay interrogates sexual normativity by defining and affirming the relevance of black collectivity to …