Performing Blackness in Contemporary African American Metatheater: Genre and Media Innovations on the Axis of Political Comment and Theater Aesthetics

Description

Paper presented at the New Scholars' Forum during the 2021 IFTR virtual conference.

Over the past fifteen years, the American theater scene has seen the emergence of a new generation of young, experimental black playwrights. The innovative quality of writers like Jackie Sibblies Drury, Jeremy O. Harris, and Michael R. Jackson has already been recognized by prestigious award committees like the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Awards. However, the amount of academic output on their work remains underwhelming. Moreover, the few scholarly articles devoted to their work tend to focus mostly on the political repercussions of their plays (e.g. Bruin 2019; Frisina 2020; Post 2019), while the wider aesthetic implications of their metatheatrical experiments with ‘typically American’ genres and media like melodrama, minstrelsy, reality TV, or soap opera remain largely undiscussed. The presentation proposes a methodology that combines post-black theatre studies with intermedial and genre theory to elucidate how the genre and media innovations of these emerging black playwrights position themselves on the axis of political comment and theater aesthetics. In so doing, the proposed methodology should be apt to address the following questions: In what way do metatheatrical strategies affect the conceptualization of blackness on the contemporary American stage, and how does the American cultural context inform the aesthetic choices the playwrights make to self-reflexively stage race performance?

Periode	13 jul. 2021
Gehouden op	International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR), United Kingdom
Mate van erkenning	International