The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics

Demographics and the Academy

Demographics and the Academy MARGARET B. WILKERSON There are three discoveries external to the field of theater history research that are symbolic of certain factors which will affect what we think about, what we teach, and what we do in the next several decades. First, scientists have traced the genetic origins of the human race back to Australopithecus afarensis, the scientific name for "Lucy," a black female who lived three million years ago in southern Africa, and who, based on genetic tracing, is essentially credited as the mother of the human race. In the signifying world of theater, the idea of a black African woman as our collective mother must give us pause and makes for interesting siblings and in-laws. Second, a recent book by Martin Bernal, entitled Black Athena, not only documents the ancient Greeks' admitted indebtedness to ancient Africa for fundamental aspects of their civilization such as culture, language, and institutions, but documents a decision made in German universities in the late eighteenth century systematically to deny that history and black Africa's contribution to ancient Greece, the "foundation" of Western civilization . This well-documented work is built upon earlier studies by eminent African and African American scholars such as Cheikh Anta Diop, Chancellor Williams, William Leo Hansberry, Ivan Van Sertima, and J. A. Rogers, whose work was not published as widely as Bernal's. Demographics and the Academy : 239 Third, demographic projections indicate that, by the year 2024, 40% of u.s. r8- to 24-year-olds will be minority (black, Hispanic, Native American , and Asian American). Already my own campus, the University of California at Berkeley, is experiencing this demographic shift. Three years ago, Berkeley admitted its first freshman class in which white students were a numerical minority. This year blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asian Americans collectively comprise a majority of the Berkeley undergraduates. I am currently serving on a commission appointed by our chancellor to study the implications of this shift and to recommend to my university how it should respond to these changes. Among our many problems is linguistics-what do you call minorities when they become a majority? These discoveries represent fundamental changes which confront this country. As "minorities" constitute higher and higher proportions of our youthful population, their access to higher education becomes ever more critical. A recent report by a Blue Ribbon Committee headed by presidents Carter and Ford, One-Third of a Nation, spoke to the urgency of the situation. If the lofty ideal of an educated populace does not excite you, then surely the necessity that these young people be able to contribute to the Social Security system will-since our retirement income will depend upon their productivity. What are the implications of these demographic changes for our profession? Theater provides an opportunity for a community to come together and reflect on itself. The liveliest of arts, it subsumes and utilizes the other arts and presents in the existential present of time and space an image of reality that has the potential to go beyond age and culture. It is not only the mirror through which a society can reflect upon itself-it also helps to shape the perceptions of that culture through the power of its imaging. We have viewed ourselves as inheritors of European cultural traditions and, in a colonialist posture, traced our roots to the ancient Greeks, ignoring the influence of ancient African civilizations on ancient Greek culture . That narrowing of our traditions not only defined out of existence the culture of whole groups of people, people of color and women (most of the world, I might add), but excluded with it alternative perspectives and ways of seeing and knowing. 240 : The Academic Institution Today, however, with the explosion of new scholarship by and about women and people of color both nationally and internationally, the customary view of our history and our culture is being challenged. The questions raised are so fundamental that they force us to reconsider our most sacrosanct notions-our canon, our period concepts, our curriculum, and our methods of structuring knowledge and ideas, to mention only a few. We can no longer teach or even study theater as we have in the past. Those of us in theater production programs will find ourselves increasingly marginalized or isolated in our institutions if we do not include in very fundamental ways the new population (students of color and others) constituting...