Contemporary African-American dramatists often use historical events from slavery to the Civil Rights Movement as sources of inspiration for their plays. In this course we will approach black history through the lens of African-American playwrights such as Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, Alice Childress, Ntozake Shange, August Wilson, and Suzan-Lori Parks and analyze the ways in which these dramatists have creatively transformed real events into fictional narratives. We will begin with a very short outline of African-American history up to 1960 and then study the plays in chronological order of their publication date. This procedure not only allows us to discover aesthetic changes in African-American drama, but it also provides us with surprising insights into the African-American past and its relationship to the present as we jump back and forth in time.
Required texts:
- Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun, 1959
- James Baldwin, Blues for Mister Charlie, 1964
- Alice Childress, Wine in the Wilderness, 1969
- Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf (1976)
- August Wilson, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, 1984
- Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog/Underdog, 2002
- Additional texts will be made available on StudIP.
