The American black play as a new genre of english

Abstract

This article views the American black play as a new genre of English with its own material, aesthetic and ideological characteristics, and traces its discursive development into a hybrid construct. Exploring the course of its development from the 1960s to the present, it focuses upon canonical plays by the most significant African-American playwrights whose common goal has been to emphasize the sociopolitical necessity for re-identification or transformation of African-American identity and so challenge the politics of homogenization that determined the monocultural character of American theatrical discourse for many decades. Their plays use subversive strategies resulting from the hybridization of language, of narrative forms and aesthetic styles. In the conclusion, attention is drawn to the success of the black play in destabilizing the linguistic and narrative networks of the past and establishing a new subversive theatrical language of substantial political significance for the theatre within and beyond the USA.

Keywords:

• Black American play
• new English
• hybridity
• postcolonial drama

Notes

For the radical principles of this artistic movement see Neal (1971) and Baraka (1966).

The OBIE Awards for Off-Broadway theatrical achievements are bestowed annually by the newspaper The Village Voice.

Kennedy's non-militant, surrealist psychodramas of the 1960s were not highly appreciated by the Black Arts Movement. Kennedy was specifically criticized as self-centred, representing negative images of blackness and ‘yearning for acceptance by white culture’ (Löfgren, 2003: 425; see also 445: note 4). For an illuminating comparison of the black aesthetic in Baraka's Dutchman and the Slave and Kennedy's The Owl Answers, see Löfgren (2003).

Wilson received the Pulitzer Prize for Fences and for The Piano Lesson. His plays also received the New York Drama Circle Award for Best Play, among other awards.

For a linguistic study of African-American English, see Baugh (2000).

As Parks is reported to have said: ‘If language is a construct and writing is a construct and Signifyin(g) on the double construct is the daily use, then I have chosen to Signify on the Signifyin(g)’ (quoted in Solomon, 1990: 75 – 6). On the musicality of Parks's Language see Louise Bernard (1997).

For various responses to the question ‘how black theatre and performance constitute a particularly “black thing”’, see the special issue on Black Performance of the Theatre Journal 57.4 (2005).