Collusions of Fact & Fiction

Performing Slavery in the Works of Suzan-Lori Parks and Kara Walker
Erscheinungsjahr 2021
ISBN: 978-1-60938-778-5
Verlag: University of Iowa Press

Buch, Englisch, 268 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 149 mm x 226 mm, Gewicht: 390 g

Reihe: Studies Theatre Hist & Culture

Collusions of Fact and Fiction traces a generational shift in late twentieth-century African American cultural engagements with the history and legacies of transatlantic slavery. With a focus on works by playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and visual artist Kara Walker, the book explores how, in comparison to the first wave of neo-slave narratives of the 1970s and 1980s, artists of the 1990s and early 2000s tend to approach the past from the vantage point of a liberal entanglement of fact and fiction as well as a highly playful, often humorous, and sometimes irreverent signifying on entrenched motifs, iconographies, and historiographies.

Saal argues that the attempt to reconstruct or recuperate the experience of African Americans under slavery is no longer at stake in the works of artists growing up in the post–Civil Rights era. Instead, they lay bare the discursive dimension of our contemporary understanding of the past and address the continued impact of its various verbal and visual signs upon contemporary identities. In this manner, Parks and Walker stake out new possibilities for engaging the past and inhabiting the present and future.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Saal, Ilka

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Dramen und Dramatiker
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Geschichte der Sklaverei
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Theaterwissenschaft

Über Autor(innen)

Ilka Saal is professor of American literature at the University of Erfurt. She is the author of New Deal Theater: The Vernacular Tradition in American Political Theater. She lives in Leipzig, Germany.