Black arts and white devils: the theatre of black power

• Autor(a) principal: Brewer, Mary F.
• Data de Publicação: 2011
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34632/mathesis.2011.5227

This essay explores how theater of the Black Arts Movement served as an important public forum in the American Civil Rights Movement. The dramatic representations of black and white identities proffered by Black Power dramatists challenged the validity of dominant ideology surrounding national identity primarily by subverting the tenets of American civil religion, and thereby demonstrating how myths surrounding national identity bind some together while causing violent ruptures between other kinds of Americans. However, dissenting stories of American national life and identity that characterized drama of the Black Arts movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s offered more than mere responses to the mainstream. Rather, plays that emerged out of the context of Black Power activism and philosophy provided audiences with new, alternative conceptions of American identity, with which black Americans, historically excluded from narratives of the national self, could identify and emulate.