ABSTRACT
This collection of critical essays on plays by African American female playwrights from the post-reconstruction period to the present provides thematic analyses of plays by major and less widely known African American women playwrights The contributors examine the plays as vehicles of public discourse, and as explorations of issues of African American identity. Essays explore the themes of sexuality, agency, anger, and self-concept in the plays of African American Women.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter |12 pages
Remaking the Minstrel
Pauline Hopkins's Peculiar Sam and the Post-Reconstruction Black Subject
chapter |18 pages
Before the Strength, the Pain
Portraits of Elderly Black Women in Early Twentieth-Century Anti-Lynching Plays
chapter |12 pages
Segregated Sisterhood
Anger, Racism, and Feminism in Alice Childress's Florence and Wedding Band.
1
chapter |26 pages
Black Male Subjectivity Deferred?
The Quest for Voice and Authority in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun
chapter |18 pages
The Discourse of Intercourse
Sexuality and Eroticism in African American Women's Drama
chapter |20 pages
The Nightmare of History
Conceptions of Sexuality in Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro
1
chapter |20 pages
“Filled with the Holy Ghost”
Sexual Dimension and Dimensions of Sexuality in the Theater of Ntozake Shange
