Prefiguring postblackness cultural memory, drama, and the African American freedom struggle of the 1960s Bunch Davis, Carol. creator text bibliography Criticism, interpretation, etc. msu 2015 monographic eng print x, 210 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm "Prefiguring Postblackness explores the tensions between cultural memory of the African American Freedom Struggle and representations of African American identity staged in five plays produced between 1959 and 1969 during the Freedom Struggle era. Carol Bunch Davis shows how these plays' representations complicate reductive iterations of blackness, which often limit the Freedom Struggle era to Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest and cast Malcolm X's black nationalism as undermining civil rights movement's advances. These five plays strategically revise the rhetoric, representations, ideologies, and iconography of the African American Freedom Struggle, subverting its dominant narrative. This revision critiques racial uplift ideology's tenets of civic and moral virtue as a condition of African American full citizenship, as well as reimagines the Black Arts movement's restrictive notions of black authenticity as a condition of racial identity. These staged representations construct a counter-narrative to cultural memory of the Freedom Struggle in the very midst of that era. In their use of a "postblack ethos" to enact African American subjectivity, the plays envision black identity beyond the quest for freedom, anticipating what blackness might look like when it moves beyond the struggle for collective freedom. The plays range from the canonical (Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun and Amiri Baraka's Dutchman) to celebrated, yet understudied works (Alice Childress's Wine in the Wilderness; Howard Sackler's The Great White Hope; Charles Gordone's No Place to Be Somebody). Finally, Davis discusses recent revivals, showing how these 1960s plays shape dimensions of modern drama well beyond the decade of their creation"-- Carol Bunch Davis. Includes bibliographical references and index. n-us--- American drama African American authors History and criticism American drama 20th century History and criticism African Americans Race identity African Americans in literature African American theater HISTORY / United States / 20th Century LITERARY CRITICISM / Drama African American theater African Americans in literature African Americans Race identity American drama American drama African American authors 1900-1999 fast PS338.N4 B86 2015 812/.5409896073 HIS036060 LIT013000 Prefiguring postblackness Bunch Davis, Carol. Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2015 (DLC) 2015017042 9781496802989 (hardback) 1496802985 (hardback) 9781496802996 (ebook) 2015009869 http://www.netread.com/jcusers/1343/3049191/image/lgcover.9781496802989.jpg http://www.netread.com/jcusers/1343/3049191/image/lgcover.9781496802989.jpg DLC 150428 20170928110412.0 in00003605527 eng