DRAMA 585 A: Seminar in Dramatic Theory

Drama 585 A

African American Performance

Fall 2020

Class meeting times: Monday 2:30-5:20 pm

Location: Zoom

Instructor: Dr. Stefka Mihaylova

Office Hours: by appointment, ZOOM

E-mail: stefka.mihaylova@gmail.com

Premise

This course explores how African American performance contributed to the emergence and development of a black public. Topics include the opening of the African Company in 1821, the first African American theatre company in New York city; black drama and abolitionism; the Harlem Renaissance; black performance during the Great Depression; the Black Arts Movement; performance and post-racial utopias at the turn of the 21^st century; and the Black Lives Matter movement, among others. In trying to understand how African American performance helped create a black public sphere, we will be engaging with theories of the public sphere and critical race theories.

Books

Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent (2006)

Gay Gibson Cima, Performing Anti-Slavery (2014)

Ralina Joseph, Postracial Resistance

Assessment                                                    Due

Response Papers         30%                             every Friday by noon

Two Presentations      30% (15% each)         times vary

Research Paper           40%                             Dec 14

• Abstract and bibliography Nov 20

Assignments

Weekly Response Papers: These are two-page reflections on the readings and/or in-class discussions. Reflections should be connected to your own interests and explore ideas that may be extended into your final paper. You may address questions that arise in class discussions or questions that you would like to discuss but were not addressed in class. These are informal papers; hence they do not need to be formatted like a term paper.

Presentations: Each student will lead discussion twice during the course. Based on the readings assigned for the class, prepare a list of learning objectives and assignments to achieve them. The assignments may include a discussion based on a few (up to three) strong questions; analysis of documents or videos; acting demonstrations, or anything else you that will help you fulfill your learning goals. The assignments will engage with theoretical, methodological, and/or historical issues. While the presentation should be engaging primarily with the readings for the specific class, you are encouraged to make connections with topics and material studied in previous classes.

Research Paper: This twelve-to-fifteen-page paper should analyze in further depth one of the topics studied in the course or explore a related topic not covered in the course. The response papers should help you identify your topic and develop it. While I will be providing continuous feedback through my comments on your response papers, you are also welcome to discuss topics with me in office hours. Your bibliography should include at least eight secondary sources.

Class schedule (by week number):

Week One

Oct 5 What is “the public sphere”?

Read: Habermas, introduction to The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), pp. 1-56 at http://pages.uoregon.edu/koopman/courses_readings/phil123-net/publicness... Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 14.1 (2002): 49-90 (electronically available);

Week Two

Oct 12 Black Publics and Black Spaces

Read: Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, “Introduction: The Performative Commons and the Aesthetic Atlantic,” and chapter six in New World Drama (2014), 1-30 and 215-61(electronically available through UW library); Joanna Brooks, “The Early American Public Sphere and the Emergence of a Black Print Counterpublic,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.1 (2005): 67-92 (available through JSTOR); Michael Warner, et al., “A Soliloquy Lately Spoken at the African Theatre,” American Literature 73.1 (2001): 1-46 (electronically available);

Week Three

Oct 19 The Haitian Revolution and the Minstrel Show

Read: Douglas A. Jones, “Black Politics but Not Black People,” TDR 57.2 (2013): 21-37 (electronically available); Tracy C. Davis, “‘I Long for My Home in Kentuck’: Christy’s Minstrels in Mid-19^th Century Britain,” TDR 57.2 (2013): 38-65; and Emily Roxworthy, “Black Face Behind Barbed Wire,” TDR 57.2 (2013): 123-42.

Watch: PBS Egalite for All: Tousssaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution (available on youtube)

Week Four

Oct 26 Sentimentalism, Melodrama, and the Abolitionist Movement

Read: Watch: American Experience. The Abolitionists, part 1, PBS documentary (electronically available through the UW website)

Read: George Aiken, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (electronically available); Margaret Cohen, “Sentimental Communities,” in The Literary Channel: The International Invention of the Novel, 106-32 (electronically available); and Gay Gibson Cima, “From Sentimental Sympathy to Activist Self-Judgment,” in Performing Anti-Slavery (2014), pp. 39-90.

Week Five

Nov 9 The Harlem Renaissance

Read: Part I “Foundations of the Harlem Renaissance,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, ed. George Hutchinson, pp. 13-54 (electronically available); W.E.B. DuBois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” at www.coreknowledge.org/mimik/mimik_uploads/documents/297/Du%20Bois%20WEB%20%20Criteria%20of%20Negro%20Art.pdf; W.E.B. DuBois, The Star of Ethiopia (electronically available); Willis Richardson, “The Hope of a Negro Drama,” Crisis 19.1 (November 1919), 338 at https://library.brown.edu/pdfs/129604803231250.pdf; Willis Richardson, The Chip Woman’s Fortune (electronically available); Alain Locke, “Art or Propaganda?” http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai3/protest/text10/lockeartorpropaganda.pdf; and Alain Locke, “The Negro and the American Stage” and “The Drama of negro Life,” in The Works of Alain Locke, ed. Charles Molesworth and henry Louis Gates Jr. (electronically available)

Week Six

Nov 16, Black Women and Modernism

Read: Introduction and chapters five, and six from Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (2008), pp. 1-17; 156-88; 189-237 (electronically available)

Week Seven

Nov 23, Lynching and Performance

Read: chapters 5 in Harvey Young, Embodying Black Experience (2010) (electronically available); and C. Riley Snorton, preface, introduction, and chapter 5 in Black on Both Sides (2017) (electronically available)

Week Eight Black Broadway

Paul Laurence Dunbar, In Dahomey (1902) (electronically available);

and Daphne Brooks, “Alien/Nation: Re-Imagining the Black Body (Politic) in Williams and Walker’s In Dahomey,” in Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent (2006), 207-280.

Week Nine

Nov 30, The Black Arts Movement

Read: Sonia Sanchez, Sister Son/ji (1969) (electronically available); Amiri Baraka, “The Revolutionary Theatre,” http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai3/protest/text12/barakatheatre.pdf;

and La Donna Forsgren, Introduction and chapters one, two, and three in In Search of Our Warrior Mothers (2018) (electronically available)

Week Ten

Dec 7, Postracial Dreams and the BLM Movement

Watch: Young Jean Lee, The Shipment at https://youngjeanlee.org/work/the-shipment/

Read: Ralina Joseph, Introduction and chapter 1 and 2 from Postracial Resistance (2018); and Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Seizing the Stage: Social Performances from Mao Zedong to Martin Luther King Jr., and Black Lives Matter Today,” TDR 61.1 (2017): 14-42 (electronically available)

Your final papers are due on Dec 14.