The books here are a selected representation of what is available. Search the library catalog to discover more!
A History of African American Theatre
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This definitive history of African-American theatre embraces companies from across the U.S., as well as the anglophone Caribbean and African-American companies touring Europe, Australia and Africa. Representing a catholicity of styles, from African ritual to European forms, amateur to professional, and political nationalism to integration, the volume covers all aspects of performance.
The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre
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a comprehensive overview of African American theatre, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Along the way, it chronicles the evolution of African American theatre and its engagement with the wider community, including discussions of slave rebellions on the national stage, African Americans on Broadway, the Harlem Renaissance, African American women dramatists, and the 'New Negro' and 'Black Arts' movements.
The Free Southern Theater, By the Free Southern Theater. a Documentary of the South's Radical Black Theater
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With Journals, Letters, Poetry, Essays
African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader
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African American Performance and Theater History is an anthology of critical writings that explores the intersections of race, theater, and performance in America. Assembled by two esteemed scholars in black theater, Harry J. Elam, Jr. and David Krasner.
A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910-1927
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These were the fertile years when the residents of northern Manhattan were at the vanguard of artistic ferment, leading their downtown counterparts while at the same time playing a pivotal role in one of the most important political movements of the twentieth century: black nationalism.
Blacks in Blackface: A Sourcebook on Early Black Musical Shows
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Blacks in Blackface was the first and most extensive book up to that time to deal exclusively with every aspect of all-African American musical comedies performed on the stage between 1900 and 1940. An invaluable resource for scholars and historians focused on African American culture, this new edition provides information on legitimate musical comedies, including show synopses, casts, songs, and production credits.
Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930
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This book demonstrates that popular lynching plays were mechanisms through which African American communities survived actual and photographic mob violence. Often available in periodicals, lynching plays were read aloud or acted out by black church members, schoolchildren, and families. Koritha Mitchell shows that African Americans performed and read the scripts in community settings to certify to each other that lynch victims were not the isolated brutes that dominant discourses made them out to be. Instead, the play scripts often described victims as honorable heads of household being torn from model domestic units by white violence.
African American Theater Buildings: An Illustrated Historical Directory, 1900–1955
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African American theater buildings were theaters owned or managed by blacks or whites and serving an African American audience. Nearly 2,000 such theaters, including nickelodeons, vaudeville houses, storefronts, drive-ins, opera houses and neighborhood movie theaters, existed in the 20th century, yet very little has been written about them. In this book the African American theater buildings from 1900 through 1955 are arranged by state, then by city, and then alphabetically under the name by which they were known.
White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour: William Brown's African and American Theater
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In 1821, William Brown, a free man of color, opened a pleasure garden in Manhattan for black New Yorkers, who were barred admittance to whites-only venues offering drama, music, and refreshment. Brown expanded his enterprises, founding a series of theaters that featured African Americans and that drew increasingly integrated audiences. McAllister explores Brown's pioneering career and reveals how each of Brown's ventures explicitly cultivated an intercultural, multiracial environment.
The African American Theatre Directory, 1816-1960: A Comprehensive Guide to Early Black Theatre Organizations, Companies, Theatres, and Performing Groups
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Contemporary Plays by African American Women
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African American women have increasingly begun to see their plays performed from regional stages to Broadway. Yet many of these artists still struggle to gain attention. In this volume, Sandra Adell draws from the vital wellspring of works created by African American women in the twenty-first century to present ten plays by both prominent and up-and-coming writers. Taken together, the selections portray how these women engage with history as they delve into--and shake up--issues of gender and class to craft compelling stories of African American life. Gliding from gritty urbanism to rural landscapes, these works expand boundaries and boldly disrupt modes of theatrical representation. Selections: Blue Door , by Tanya Barfield; Levee James , by S. M. Shephard-Massat; Hoodoo Love , by Katori Hall; Carnaval , by Nikkole Salter; Single Black Female , by Lisa B. Thompson; Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine , by Lynn Nottage; BlackTop Sky , by Christina Anderson; Voyeurs de Venus , by Lydia Diamond; Fedra , by J. Nicole Brooks; and Uppa Creek: A Modern Anachronistic Parody in the Minstrel Tradition , by Keli Garrett.
The Methuen Drama Book of Plays by Black British Writers
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The Methuen Drama Book of Plays by Black British Writers provides an essential anthology of six of the key plays that have shaped the trajectory of British black theatre from the late-1970s to the present day. In doing so it charts the journey from specialist black theatre companies to the mainstream, including West End success, while providing a cultural and racial barometer for Britain during the last forty years.
Black Female Playwrights: an Anthology of Plays Before 1950
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Perkins has selected nineteen plays from seven writers who were among the major dramatizers of the black experience during this early period. As forerunners to the activist black theater of the 1950s and 1960s, these plays represent a critical stage in the development of black drama in the United States.
The Methuen Drama Book of Post-Black Plays
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Reflecting this multiplicity of perspectives, these plays explode the traditional ways of representing black families on the American stage, and create new means to consider the interplay of race, with questions of class, gender, and sexuality. They engage and critique current definitions of black and African-American identity, as well as previous limitations placed on what constitutes blackness and black theatre.
Black Theater, U.S.A.: Forty-five Plays by Black Americans, 1847-1974.
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Various themes and styles are represented in this anthology of comic and tragic works by Black American playwrights.
Black Theater: a 20th Century Collection of the Work of Its Best Playwrights
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St. Louis woman / Arna Bontemps and Countee Cullen -- Take a giant step / Louis Peterson -- In splendid error / William Branch -- Trouble in mind / Alice Childress -- Simply heavenly / Langston Hughes -- A raisin in the sun / Lorraine Hansberry -- Purlie Victorious / Ossie Davis -- Dutchman / LeRoi Jones -- The amen corner / James Baldwin -- In the wine time / Ed Bullins -- No place to be somebody / Charles Gordone -- Ceremonies in dark old men / Lonne Elder III.
A Sourcebook on African-American Performance: Plays, People, Movements
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The first volume to consider African-American performance between and beyond the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and the New Black Renaissance of the 1990s.As with all titles in the Worlds of Performance series, the Sourcebook consists of classic texts as well as newly commissioned pieces by notable scholars, writers and performers. It includes the plays'Sally's Rape'by Robbie McCauley and'The American Play'by Suzan-Lori Parks, and comes complete with a substantial, historical introduction by Annemarie Bean.
Blackeyed: Plays and Monologues
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The topics covered in the book include housing and foreclosure, suicide, assault, mental health, the Black male experience, and more. The book intersects with critical race theory because the majority of this work positions race at the center of the experiences of the fictional or fictionalized characters. Embedded in these chapters are the interweaving of personal and ancestral stories, news reports, interviews, and research expressed in language unapologetically Black, critical, reflexive, and proud.
Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women
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This anthology is the first to address the impact of lynching on U.S. theater and culture. By focusing on women’s unique view of lynching, this collection of plays reveals a social history of interracial cooperation between black and white women and an artistic tradition that continues to evolve through the work of African American women artists. This collection includes examples of both one-act and full-length dramas written over a time span of approximately eighty years (1916-1994).
Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body
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Embodying Black Experience pinpoints selected artistic and athletic performances---photography, boxing, theater/performance art, and museum display---as portals through which to gain access to the lived experiences of a variety of individuals. The photographs of Joseph Zealy, Richard Roberts, and Walker Evans; the boxing performances of Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and Muhammad Ali; the plays of Suzan-Lori Parks, Robbie McCauley, and Dael Orlandersmith; and the tragic performances of Bootjack McDaniels and James Cameron offer insight into the lives of black folk across two centuries and the ways that black artists, performers, and athletes challenged the racist (and racializing) assumptions of the societies in which they lived.
Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance
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McMillan contends that black women artists practiced a purposeful self- objectification, transforming themselves into art objects. In doing so, these artists raised new ways to ponder the intersections of art, performance, and black female embodiment. McMillan reframes the concept of the avatar in the service of black performance art, describing black women performers'skillful manipulation of synthetic selves and adroit projection of their performances into other representational mediums.
The Search for Wholeness and Diaspora Literacy in Contemporary African American Literature
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This volume has as a cohesive argument the exploration of the different manifestations of the search for wholeness and spirituality in the writings of contemporary African American women writers, covering different literary genres such as fiction (both novels and short stories), drama and poetry.
Understanding Suzan-Lori Parks
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Larson examines how Parks, through the innovative language and narratives of her extensive body of work, investigates and invigorates literary and cultural history. Larson discusses all of Parks's genres—play, screenplay, essay, and novel—closely reading key texts from Parks's more experimental earlier pieces as well as her more linear later narratives.
Blacktino Queer Performance
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Staging an important new conversation between performers and critics, Blacktino Queer Performance approaches the interrelations of blackness and Latinidad through a stimulating mix of theory and art.
Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics
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Black Movements analyzes how artists and activists of recent decades reference earlier freedom movements in order to imagine and produce a more expansive and inclusive democracy. Through an exploration of the way that black movements create circuits connecting people across space and time, Black Movements offers important interventions into performance, literary, diaspora, and African American studies.
Black Dionysus: Greek Tragedy and African American Theatre
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The different ways in which Greek tragedy has been used by playwrights, directors and others to represent and define African American history and identity are explored in this work. Two models are offered for an Afro-Greek connection: Black Orpheus, in which the Greek connection is metaphorical, expressing the African in terms of the European; and Black Athena, in which ancient Greek culture is "reclaimed" as part of an Afrocentric tradition.
The Cambridge Companion to August Wilson
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This is a collection of essays on the work of the African American playwright August Wilson. An in-depth interview is included, and the cycle of ten plays are discussed chronologically allowing the reader to follow the unfolding story of the 20th century as seen by Wilson.
Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture
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A shrewdly designed, generously expansive, timely contribution to our understanding of how 'black' expression continues to define and defy the contours of global (post)modernity. The essays argue persuasively for a transnational ethos binding disparate African and diasporic enactments, and together provide a robust conversation about the nature, history, future, and even possibility of 'blackness' as a distinctive mode of cultural practice.