Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora (review)

Reviews Paul Carter Harrison,Victor Leo Walker II, and Gus Edwards, eds. Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. Pp. 418. $29.95. The impact on contemporaryAmerican and African-American theater attributable to August Wilson, whom we lost in October of 2005, will continue to be discernible for many years to come. The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright's cycle of ten plays, each set in a different decade of the twentieth century, reasserts the necessity ofa playwright's attention to the modalities and cadences of spoken language and realizes our highest aspirations for the art form by bringing to the stage characters and situations that are finely crafted yet so immense that in hindsight they seem like myths or legends. Black Theatre: RitualPerformance in the African Diaspora is evidence of Wilson's influence on the interpretation and theorization of drama as well. In the book's preface, Paul Carter Harrison describes a 1996 speech thatWilson delivered at Princeton University entitled "The Ground on Which I Stand." In it, the author of plays such as Fences, The Piano Lesson, and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom "dropped the gauntlet on skepticism about the validity ofBlackTheater" (1). Challenging the faulty assumption that drama by and about people ofAfrican descent is ofonly parochial interest, Wilson declared, "there is no idea that cannot be contained by black life" (1). Moreover, he demonstrated a sophisticated conceptualization of race and/as identity: "Black or African-American not only denote race, it denotes condition, and carries with it the vestige ofslavery and the social segregation and abuse of opportunity so vivid in our memory" (1). Perhaps his most significant statement was on the continued necessity of black dramatic artists to draw from the cultural traditions of the African diaspora for the sake of maintaining those traditions and making black theater a site of consistent innovation . According to Harrison,Wilson encouraged "jettisoning the aesthetic models ofWestern tradition" and embracing the "spiritual temperament ofthe ancestors whose songs, dances, and art were a manifest act of the creator from 125 126Comparative Drama whom life flowed" (1). Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora, Harrison writes, was begun in part as a response to Wilson's speech. Harrison's own writing provides other antecedents to this volume; he is perhaps best known as the author of the Obie Award-winning play The Great MacDaddy (1973) and The Drama ofNommo (1972), the latter "a project designed to construct a foundation for identifying the continuity ofAfrican cultural underpinnings in the American experience that informed the aesthetics of Black Theatre" (8). In his essay contribution to Black Theatre, Harrison explains that "Nommo" comes from the Dogon people of Mali and is their name for"the creative force that gives form to all things" (316). Harrison's TheDrama ofNommo identifies the "Nommo force," a name for the power of the word to convey a"spiritual intensity"or to invoke the spiritual realm (or both),which is utilized in the rituals in black everyday life and in the theater that derives from it,charging them with vitality. Ritual—another keyconcept,whichAmiri Baraka calls "the oldest root of performance" (378)—is theorized as "a specific, formalized , activity that a people create in order to achieve a particular psychological , physical, or spiritual result for individuals and the community" (316). The goals ofritual are notjust to entertain the audience, therefore,but to transform it; ritual requires not only the audience's attention, but its participation as well. Harrison discusses the Ring Shout, and performances by James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and even the Florida A&M University Marching Band as examples of Nommo and ritual. These principles, Black Theatre contends, are among the most distinguishing features of the theater produced within the African diaspora.With author Victor Leo Walker II, CEO ofthe African Grove Institute for the Arts—an organization also inspired by Wilson's speech—and playwright Gus Edwards, Harrison has edited a collection oftwenty-six essays, plus introductions to each offour sections, and an afterword. This volume extends the theories articulated in both Wilson's speech and Harrison's book, the latter of which is a touchstone for several of the pieces in Black...