Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory | Open Access Articles

Saving Pocahontas: A Conversation On Gender, Culture, And Power In The Storied Saving Moment, Claire Ehr Oct 2019

Saving Pocahontas: A Conversation On Gender, Culture, And Power In The Storied Saving Moment, Claire Ehr

Undergraduate Honors Papers

Pocahontas is a figure with much cultural capital, even today, and her influence was historically important to Native and European agendas alike. Pocahontas as a person indeed had a life that seemed to influence political relations between Native and European (specifically Powhatan, specifically English). However, the storied construct of Pocahontas has had significantly more cultural sway, influencing (or at least representing changes in) everything from gendered power dynamics to the interplay between the European Colonizer and the Indigenous Other.¹ Pocahontas’ image has been re-appropriated over and over throughout time to further political agendas and to represent the female and …

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Radical Black Drama-As-Theory: The Black Feminist Dramatic On The Protracted Event-Horizon, Jaye Austin Williams Jan 2018

Radical Black Drama-As-Theory: The Black Feminist Dramatic On The Protracted Event-Horizon, Jaye Austin Williams

Faculty Journal Articles

In this essay, I elaborate my present project, grounded in what I call drama theory, the critical theoretical dimensions of dramatic writing, and address the deeply troubling intramural tensions across Black Studies, between those who read blackness, and black cultural production, through largely futurist, celebratory lenses; and those who apply a structural analysis to blackness as the site against, upon, and through which the world coheres its soci(et)al apparatuses and machinations. I situate myself within the latter constellation, and sample here two plays by Suzan-Lori Parks to demonstrate how I translate the analyses of antiblack violence by black feminist …

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"Daring Propaganda For The Beauty Of The Human Mind:" Critical Consciousness-Raising In The Poetry And Drama Of The Black Power Era, 1965-1976, Markeysha D. Davis Nov 2016

"Daring Propaganda For The Beauty Of The Human Mind:" Critical Consciousness-Raising In The Poetry And Drama Of The Black Power Era, 1965-1976, Markeysha D. Davis

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is a literary and intellectual history of the contributions of black American theorists, poets, and dramatists in the 1960s and 1970s towards the establishment of black critical consciousness in order to lay grounds for black people to experience a fuller existence as human beings through black-centered creations and presentations. Through the following chapters, I establish the framework and evolution of black psyche-liberation theories—spanning Du Bois’s theory of double-conscious through the contributions of black artist-theorists like Baraka, Neal, and Woodie King, Jr., followed by examinations at length of the theories of black liberation in praxis by the poets and …

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Harry Potter And Hamilton From The Stage To The Page, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner Oct 2016

Harry Potter And Hamilton From The Stage To The Page, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

In this article originally published in Public Books, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner offers commentary on the two best-selling plays on record, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and Hamilton. Specifically, Pollack-Pelzner examines how the Anglo-American world’s favorite orphans play at home, adopted, as it were, from the stage to the page.

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Sati In Philadelphia: The Widow(S) Of Malabar, Jeffrey H. Richards Jan 2008