Theatricalizing History / Historicizing Theatre: The Burden of Minstrelsy in The America Play and Topdog/Underdog
0
조회
0
다운로드
0
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
This essay locates the historical relevance of Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play and Topdog/Underdog in the antebellum cultural iconography surrounding blackface minstrelsy. While scholarship on The America Play has primarily centered on deconstructionist interpretations, focusing on how the whiteface performance of black Lincoln destabilizes historical narratives and decenters whiteness, this essay aims to reorient the critical conversation by examining Parks’s two Lincoln plays against specific historical contexts blackface minstrelsy evokes as a socio-cultural institution. If existing critiques mainly explore how Parks’s theatre theatricalizes history through theatricalized representations of Lincoln’s assassination, the essay seeks to historicize theatre itself, particularly minstrelsy as a historically specific theatre, by situating it within broader historical and cultural frameworks and examining how its legacy shapes the racial identities and experiences represented in Parks’s two Lincoln plays. The essay argues that the socio-historical conflicts held within minstrelsy offers an insight into the dilemma the Lesser Known in The America Play faces as a black minstrel and helps explain the ways in which Lincoln and Booth — two modern dandies in Topdog/Underdog — build their identities upon and exercise them against the stereotypical renditions of African American masculinity worked out by blackface portrayals. Not only exposing minstrelsy as an ideological mechanism, Parks’s historicist meta-dramaturgy interrogates the historical burden it imposes on ‘modern black minstrels’ as a socio-cultural legacy, ultimately positioning black Lincoln’s symbolic inversion and his tenuous claim to agency within the unresolved tensions of racial conflict.
Abstract
This essay locates the historical relevance of Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play and Topdog/Underdog in the antebellum cultural iconography surrounding blackface minstrelsy. While scholarship on The America Play has primarily centered on deconstructionist interpretations, focusing on how the whiteface performance of black Lincoln destabilizes historical narratives and decenters whiteness, this essay aims to reorient the critical conversation by examining Parks’s two Lincoln plays against specific historical contexts blackface minstrelsy evokes as a socio-cultural institution. If existing critiques mainly explore how Parks’s theatre theatricalizes history through theatricalized representations of Lincoln’s assassination, the essay seeks to historicize theatre itself, particularly minstrelsy as a historically specific theatre, by situating it within broader historical and cultural frameworks and examining how its legacy shapes the racial identities and experiences represented in Parks’s two Lincoln plays. The essay argues that the socio-historical conflicts held within minstrelsy offers an insight into the dilemma the Lesser Known in The America Play faces as a black minstrel and helps explain the ways in which Lincoln and Booth — two modern dandies in Topdog/Underdog — build their identities upon and exercise them against the stereotypical renditions of African American masculinity worked out by blackface portrayals. Not only exposing minstrelsy as an ideological mechanism, Parks’s historicist meta-dramaturgy interrogates the historical burden it imposes on ‘modern black minstrels’ as a socio-cultural legacy, ultimately positioning black Lincoln’s symbolic inversion and his tenuous claim to agency within the unresolved tensions of racial conflict.