ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the representations of black women in lynching plays as well as identifying the performance strategies used by black women playwrights in anti-lynching plays to not only make black women visible within material lynching culture but through which a new black feminist subjectivity is created. “Ida’s” occupation of “the lynching story” evokes another black feminism, a blueswoman aesthetic. “Saving White Face’s” blues aesthetic directly references Campbell’s novel title, Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine. Through “Ida,” “Saving White Face” foregrounds black women’ storytelling tradition, also known as Testifyin’. Like a blueswoman singer who simultaneously preserves tradition, “shouts out” about injustice and mediates cultural change, Ida (re)tells the plot’s lynching event thereby exhibiting Judith Stephens’ third criteria of lynching drama, “a woman’s telling of events.” One way “Ida’s” blueswoman performance proves equal to other subjects is by mirroring Lily Cox.
