This article considers the use of the play within the play in recent African American dramas. Hence, the plays seem to suggest that for white liberals an affective encounter with their structural implication in the enduring legacies of slavery might be a prerequisite for imagining systemic change.
In doing so, these plays challenge both the characters who engage with the play within the play onstage as well as their off-stage audience to consider their positionality and performance in an entrenched racial scenario. American stage ever since the late s. Harris, and Suzan-Lori Parks, African American playwrights have continuously restaged the traumatic experience of slavery in order to address its various affective, psychological, epistemological, and material legacies.
As Douglas A. Jones points out, slavery has emerged "as a historical-cultural matrix with which one had to come to terms in order to understand the interrelation of power, race, and representation in the present" Jones D.
While playwrights have addressed these issues via a number of dramatic and theatrical techniques, one strategy in particular has stood out: the play within the play. In Jeremy O. This article hence asks what this traditional form affords for the interrogation of contemporary race relations. What critical insight can be gained from the replay of slavery? The two plays offer themselves up for a comparative study since both opened within few months of each other in the fall of and spring of 2 , during a period particularly ripe with racial tension and social unrest.
As an emboldened white supremacy asserted itself in a myriad of latent and blatant aggressions, a growing Black Lives Matter movement began to draw worldwide attention to the pervasive state violence committed against people of color. Both plays respond to this historical context by gauging the impact of ongoing violence on Black subjects as well as racial relations.
