The Methuen Drama Book of Post-Black Plays

Harry J. Elam is the Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities, and the Freeman-Thornton Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is author of Taking it to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka; The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson, winner of the Errol Hill Award; and co-editor of African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader; Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Drama; The Fire This Time: African American Plays for the New Millennium and Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Performance and Popular Culture. His articles have appeared in American Drama, Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, Text and Performance Quarterly as well as journals in Israel, Belgium, Poland and Taiwan and also in several critical anthologies.Douglas A. Jones, Jr. is Cotsen Fellow in the Princeton Society of Fellows at Princeton University, where he teaches in the Department of English. He has published several articles and book chapters that span a wide array of issues in (African) American cultural and literary history, race and performance, and American dramatic literature. His first book, The Captive Stage: Black Exception, Performance, and the Proslavery Imagination of the Anetbellum North, is forthcoming from University of Michigan Press. In fall of 2013, he will join the English faculty at Rutgers University.

'Post-black' refers to an emerging trend within black arts to find new and multiple expressions of blackness, unburdened by the social and cultural expectations of blackness of the past and moving beyond the conventional binary of black and white. Reflecting this multiplicity of perspectives, the plays in this collection explode the traditional ways of representing black families on the American stage, and create new means to consider the interplay of race, with questions of class, gender, and sexuality. They engage and critique current definitions of black and African-American identity, as well as previous limitations placed on what constitutes blackness and black theatre.Written by the emerging stars of American theatre such as Eisa Davis and Marcus Gardley, the plays explore themes as varied as family and individuality, alienation and gentrification, and reconciliation and belonging. They demonstrate a wide-range of formal and structural innovations for the American theatre, and reflect the important ways in which contemporary playwrights are expanding the American dramatic canon with new and diverse means of representation. Edited by two leading US scholars in black drama, Harry J. Elam Jr (Stanford) and Douglas A. Jones Jr (Princeton), this cutting edge anthology gathers together some of the most exciting new American plays, selected by a rigorous academic backbone and explored in depth by supporting critical material.

The two US editors are well-known experts in this field and their introductory essays, both to the volume and the individual sections, promises to define this area of study.

IntroductionSection I: The New Black FamilyBulrusherGood GoodsSection II: (Post-) Blackness by Non-Black PlaywrightsThe ShipmentSatellitesSection III: The Distant Present: History, Mythology, and Sexuality. . . And Jesus Moonwalks the MississippiAntebellumSection IV: Re-Imagining/Re-Engaging AfricaIn the ContinuumBlack Diamond