Abstract

Abstract:

In 1986, Albany’s Capital Repertory Company premiered Dreaming Emmett, Toni Morrison’s first and only full-length play. Commissioned by the New York State Writers Institute to “commemorate the first national holiday of Martin Luther King’s birthday,” Morrison wrote a play in which King was conspicuously absent. Instead, she imagined a fantasy taking place in “Emmett Till’s” mind who was condemned to re-dream his murder for over thirty years. In this essay, I analyze the multiple implications and uses of dreaming and temporality that circulate within Morrison’s Dreaming Emmett, a play that takes place, as Morrison states in the stage directions, “NOW.” I focus on the competing discourses of “dreams” that are packageable and easily fungible, against that of “dreaming” which, as an active verb, lands more on bodies and ongoing living. Centering how dreams and dreaming work “now” reveals Morrison’s critiques of Civil Rights commemoration projects in the mid-1980s that repur-posed black tragedies and resistive acts into “usable” and marketable units that could be useful for larger national narratives. Importantly, examining Morrison’s play demonstrates how she used performance to disrupt theatrical and political adaptations of black life as a sign of black adaptability and the resolution of national culpability.

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