African American Dramatic Literature

"In Defense of RUINED: Five Elements that Shape Lynn Nottage's Masterwork," Randy Gener's critical essay on Lynn Nottage's Pulitzer winning drama RUINED is published in "The Bedford Introduction to Drama" (Bedford/St. Martin's Press) Seventh Edition ©2013.

"Fifty-four chronologically arranged plays are illuminated by insightful commentaries and casebooks that enrich students’ contextual understanding and encourage critical thinking"

This 14-week course is a writing-intensive course with a focus on developing close reading techniques.  In Literary Studies, reading comprehension and analytical skills are important to developing critical thinking that is needed for any career or profession you are pursuing.  Reading as a discipline requires much practice and each student should aspire to become more attuned to both the historical and social context of literary works.  We will close read literary texts and films.

Because so much is lost concerning Pleasant, until more is discovered she may continue to anchor herself within dialogues of history and race through the speculative imaginings of those willing to posit the meanings within and behind her existence. Black female writers and scholars are utilizing access to publishing venues, digital media and the Internet to steadily create a postmodern counter-myth of Pleasant which circumvents her usual characterization as at once a wicked and subservient Mammy figure.

A number of foreign language versions of Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna appeared in the 1930s, which reflected the political outlook of both the far left and the far right at the time. Among these translations and adaptations, the one made by Dorothy Peterson for the Harlem Suitcase Theater in 1937 is of special interest. Although her work was intended as an aid for a free verse adaptation by Langston Hughes, this article argues that Peterson's ostensibly “literal” translation made a conscious attempt to link the late-medieval setting of the play with the faux-medieval mythology of the antebellum South, thus exposing the idea of Southern “chivalry” as based on sexual violence. Peterson's translation contains a racial coding of the original drama's characters that would have been immediately intelligible to the Harlem Suitcase Theater's audiences, and which was designed to make a culturally distant work immediately comprehensible and relevant to a specifically African American public.

Radical Humanism and Generous Tolerance "articulates the religious ideas and vision of Wole Soyinka in his non-fiction writings. It also analyzes Soyinka’s response to religious violence, terror, and the fear of religious imperialism. The book suggests the theoretical notions of radical humanism and generous tolerance best summarize Soyinka’s religious ideals and religious piety.

In response to religious violence and fanaticism in the world, Soyinka turns to the ethics and values of humanism as a better alternative to religious exclusivism and claims of absolute truths, and as a way to promote global peace, planetary love, and cultivate interreligious dialogue and understanding. Soyinka’s radical humanism is grounded in the religious ethos and sensibility, and the moral vision of the Yoruba people, as well as in the Western theistic Humanist tradition and secularism.

Through a close reading of Soyinka’s religious works, the book argues that African traditional religions could be used as a catalyst to promote religious tolerance and human solidarity, and that they may also contribute to the preservation of life, and the fostering of an ethics of care and relationality. Soyinka brings in conversation Western Humanist tradition and African indigenous Humanist tradition for the sake of the world, for the sake of global shalom, and for the sake of human flourishing.

Written in an especially turbulent period, when the civil rights movement in the U.S. and the anti-colonial uprisings in Africa filled the firmament with their apocalyptic prophecies, Dutchman stands out as Baraka‟s earliest and most unsettling response to the absolutist rhetoric of white ideology....

Chapter 4 of _Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era_ (Virginia, 2013): Addressing the archival and epistemic limits of attempting to historicize New Negro cultural and literary involvements in official internationalism, chapter four of _Artistic Ambassadors_ examines the repressed presences of Archibald Grimké’s diplomatic work within the literary work of his daughter Angelina W. Grimké. Archibald’s lifetime of vivid descriptions of his four-year consulship in Santo Domingo (from 1894 to 1898) caused Angelina, even while in the sixth decade of her life, to feel she “seem[ed] to have been there too.” Interrogating Angelina’s sense of virtual presence, the chapter reads Archibald’s diplomatic work as the foreign presence against which Angelina defines the domestic (i.e., simultaneously maternal and national) project in her drama Rachel (1916). Rachel, in turn, offers unexpected insight into the epistemic violence involved in African American participation in the US’s diplomatic program. Reading a series of textual gaps within the drama, this chapter locates Rachel’s metonymies of absence and presence. These metonymies are instructive vis-à-vis the ways in which official internationalism has often functioned—epistemically and archivally—to silence black men while erasing the material presence of black women within the international world.