Quest/ion of Identities in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Post-revolutionary Drama
Inspired both by the Black Arts Movement and the postmodern revolt against it, Parks has concentrated on crafting provocative plays that represent and emphasize the concerns and quest/ion of identities for African Americans. In the present essay, I argue that Parks is interested in questioning the f...
Saved in:
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
European Association for American Studies
2016-08-01
|
| Series: | European Journal of American Studies |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/11613 |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| Summary: | Inspired both by the Black Arts Movement and the postmodern revolt against it, Parks has concentrated on crafting provocative plays that represent and emphasize the concerns and quest/ion of identities for African Americans. In the present essay, I argue that Parks is interested in questioning the former constructed racial boundaries of blackness and revolutionary ideologies of the Black Arts Movement without turning a blind eye to the concerns of African American community. I show that Parks attempts to escape the traditions of the Black Arts Movement, which depended on conventions of narrative realism and straightforward language to transmit its revolutionary messages. My goal is to show how Parks’s plays make use of postmodern aesthetics and paradigms to transform the conventional features of playwriting, create indeterminacies toward dominant systems of oppression and raise the quest/ion of identities for African Americans in a post-revolutionary manner. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 1991-9336 |