The African Diaspora and the Disciplines

9. “Function at the Junction”? African Diaspora Studies and Theater Studies

9 “Function at the Junction”? African Diaspora Studies and Theater Studies Sandra L. Richards To specify a relationship between African Diaspora Studies and Theater Studies is in one sense to draw a map, but it soon becomes apparent that one can not get there from here, for African Diaspora Studies has, at present, little connection to or visibility within Theater Studies. Unable to pinpoint the place or official site of conjuncture, I offer instead an itinerary by which we may arrive at a space where the practice of diaspora and theater meet in their pursuit of the cherished objective of enacting community.1 Given the consistent conflation of Performance Studies with Theater Studies, the essay first reviews disciplinary distinctions that determine the object of study and status of evidence. As will become apparent , the dominance of the written text in Theater Studies has negatively predisposed the discipline toward African Diaspora Studies, a fact that the subsequent review of doctoral dissertations and recent publications confirms . The essay then turns its focus outside the academy in order to offer a brief survey of the emergence within the arts of an Afro­ centric perspective that necessarily assumed diaspora, understood as cultural continuity between an original source culture and descendant societies produced by forced migration and adaptation to hostile new environments. This Black Arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s would provide infrastructural resources for contemporary Black Theater and Black Performance Studies in the United States. But because its definition of diaspora tended in practice to be oriented toward ritual and/or the past, the essay then turns to a brief reading of texts, selected so as to highlight questions of memory and bodily archives, circulation, translation, imagination, and reinvention that are central to how diaspora is currently understood. Finally, it proposes routes that African Diaspora Studies scholars may opt to travel in further shaping an interdisciplinary field that through its rigorous self-­ reflexivity, conceptualizes itself not as the colonizing center of the map of 193 194 Sandra L. Richards scholarship on African peoples but rather as one dynamic itinerary of how humans institute community and struggle for a better life. A S t a r t i n g P o i n t Because a cartographer’s perspective at least partially determines the map she draws, I wish to indicate the location from which I am surveying the terrain, a space shared, I believe, by the relatively few scholars trained during the 1960s and 1970s in dramatic literature in American academies and specializing in black theater. Responsive to the sociopolitical ferment of the times, this cohort was committed to thinking about black cultural production in terms that did not reduce it to a poor derivative of Euro-­ American achievements. We entered the academy at a time of struggle for the introduction of Black and Ethnic Studies, such that if we encountered the scholarship of W. E. B. Du Bois, Melville Herskovits, Janheinz Jahn, or Lorenzo Dow Turner, our likely route to these pioneers in African Diaspora Studies was through informal study groups and self-­ directed reading. Although some of us may also have been involved in making theater as actors , directors, or costumers, as PhD graduate students (and then later, as doctoral holders) we largely adhered to the textual dominance in Theater Studies, discussed below, even while trying to revise, expand, or introduce new categories of what constituted theater. Although much has changed in the intervening three or four decades, the emphasis on theater scripts remains strong. And because written scripts circulate more easily than people, I will use the former as the space from which to chart an itinerary or relationship between Theater Studies and African Diaspora Studies. T h e a t e r S t u d i e s , P e r f o r m a n c e S t u d i e s Though many academic colleagues use the terms “theater studies” and “performance studies” interchangeably, and scholars trained in one area sometimes publish in the other, these two disciplines have distinct yet interdependent histories that differently determine their study of black cultural production. Within the history of Western theatrical practice, the scriptural has come to dominate other languages of the theater, such as music, dance, and gesture, so that even though the study of theater encompasses attention to how reenactment is made, the written text is at the center, providing the raison d’être for performance decisions (McAuley 4–7). Linked to the...