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A Web of Traditions: Black Performance and Politics in George C. Wolfe’s "The Colored Museum"

 

In the talk I will briefly discuss my first book, The African American Theatrical Body, and then use George C. Wolfe's play, The Colored Museum, to introduce the central strands of the second book project, Black Movements: Performance, Politics, and Migration. My second book project continues analysis that I began in The African American Theatrical Body of the shape of history. In the second project, however, I consider how people of African descent in the Americas have formed multi-temporal literary, performative, and theatrical traditions as an integral and necessary part of their self-fashioning. Considering how black cultural and political traditions function as webs instead of in a linear, progressive trajectory enables a reconsideration of the central threads that tie (the) tradition(s) together.

 

Soyica Colbert is a candidate for the English faculty position in Africana Literature.