African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader, and: A History of African American Theatre (review)

Joseph Roach writes: "One of the most important challenges facing all scholars in theatre and performance studies today is how to do justice to the centrality of African American contributions to cultural life in the United States" (Elam and Krasner 102). There is no better way to combat the marginalized, or often ignored, contributions of African Americans to the theatre than to read these two excellent complementary texts. Whereas James V. Hatch and Errol G. Hill o ff er a panoramic historical perspective revealing the totality of African American theatre history, Harry J. Elam Jr. and David Krasner have assembled 17 essays from scholars that explore subjects to illuminate political, social, and cultural issues as they impact race, theatre, performance, and history.

In African American Performance and Theater History, Elam and Krasner provide a thematic schema of four headings, four essays under each heading, to navigate the complex and incendiary issues that situate race and performative events in an American context. Under the heading "Social Protest and the Politics of Representation," Judith Williams argues that ideas and images of black women that began with Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin continue to be perpetuated. Margaret Wilkerson contextualizes Lorraine Hansberry not as the integrationist and accommodationist dramatist she is perceived to be but as a politically radical dramatist. Mike Sell tackles the Black Arts Movement, historicizing the positive attributes while describing its inherent self-destructiveness. And finally, William Sonnega, who explores the sensitive subject of race performance, appraises cross-cultural communication for the liberal audience.

Under the second heading, "Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory and Performance," Joseph Roach, while exploring African American performance, deals with slave performance at Congo Square in New Orleans;Telia Anderson investigates the nexus between the performativity of black women in churches and the transformative dynamics of spiritual connections; Henry Louis Gates Jr. (in a reprinted article from the New Yorker) historicizes the Chitlin Circuit while arguing against August Wilson's cultural politics acknowledged in his 1996 Theatre Communications Group speech; and finally, Sandra Shannon connects August Wilson to Africa via the African symbols and motifs he uses in his dramas.

"Intersections of Race and Gender" houses the following topics: Annemarie Bean meshes race, gender, and cross-dressing impersonators together to investigate the nefarious and derogatory stereotypes established by American black-face minstrelsy; Krasner relies on an African American Salome to map out the legacy of primitivism while advancing the contributions of African American female choreographers; Kimberly Dixon uses contemporary writers, particularly Suzan-Lori Parks, to argue for the primacy of "creative nomadism" in analyses of various texts; and Jay Plum dissects Pomo Afro Homos' Dark Fruit to reexamine the gender politics that permeate black homo/heterosexuality.

"African American Performativity and the Performance of Race" deals with the ways in which race and racial identity are tied to performance. Diana Paulin heads the section with Bartley Campbell's The White Slave (1882), navigating the connections between racial performance, miscegenation, and the explosive interracial sexual unions. Tina Redd reveals the negative impact of racism on the short life of Birmingham's Federal Theater Project Negro Unit. Elam, using William Wells Brown's The Escape, or, A Leap to Freedom (1858), and Charles Gordone's Pulitzer Prize-winning No Place To Be Somebody (1969), places the black performers in the context of theatricality, while arguing that the limited meaning of blackness can be expanded via theatrical representations. Finally, Christina E. Sharpe uses Gayl Jones's novel Corregidora to explore how memory is constructed through performance. The anthology also provides a roundtable discussion; scholars (primarily James V. Hatch, Sandra Richards, and Margaret B. Wilkerson) provide...