"'I can't hear anything but you staring at me': Black Identity in Jackie Sibblies Drury's Fairview and Amiri Baraka's Dutchman"
Abstrakt
Even a brief study of the history of African American drama reveals a question repeating itself with periodical precision: "What is a black play?" From W.E.B. DuBois, to Amiri Baraka, to Suzan Lori Parks, generations of scholars and playwrights have pondered and answered this inquiry.
While it is certainly motivated by the desire of a new generation to reflect its experience and opinion on an essential question, it is also a tell-tale sign of an identity crisis underlying African American performance. This paper will centre on the representation of this crisis in two texts - one contemporary and one from the 1960s - and show how they speak to the most important relationship in African American theatre: that between the play and its audience.
While this relationship is key to every performance, African American performance enters it with a storied history of twisted power dynamics. In other words, the issues in the relationship are not a matter of incongruity or misunderstanding; they reflect a deep paradigm of race in which the power to define black identity isn't in the hands of African Americans, but in the hands of the white majority.
This has been most recently explored in Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury and I will use this text and contrast it against a classic of African American drama - Amiri Baraka's Dutchman - to show how the views of "white-defined-blackness" have changed through the century, how they have remained the same, and how they still relate to power dynamics from over a century ago.