“He is One for History” The History of the Blacks in Susan Lori Parks’s The America Play
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36473/ujhss.v62i3.2165Keywords:
The Lesser Known, impersonating, Parks, The America Play, The Foundling Father, African American canon of history, History PlaysAbstract
History in the plays of African-American playwright Susan Lori Parks (b. 1963) is affirmed, reenacted, and rewritten to represent the black identity. It is seen as a necessary requisite for understanding the past, living the present with all its repercussions, and safeguarding the future of black generations. In her “Possession”, she claims that the white history of literature must be put in question because they have documented history from their own white perspective only, neglecting the fact that the blacks have their own role in that history. She tries her best to make her plays as literary mediations in order to rewrite the unrecorded and the unremembered history of African American people. Her purpose behind staging historical events is to show the bias and prejudice of the white history. Parks’s The America Play (produced 1994) is a complex, multidimensional play about history as it has no apparent linear plot to follow. This makes Parks a postmodernist writer. Her aim behind staging historical events is to make them occur in reality. The aim of this study is to show how Parks, as a black African-American playwright, has been successful in showing her own rich heritage through digging up the history of the blacks in order to call for their freedom and give them the voice that has been absent for centuries. This paper focusses on Susan Lori Parks’s The America Play as one of her history plays. It consists of an abstract, an introduction, and one section that tackles the history of the blacks in the play, and it ends with a conclusion that shows what the study has reached at.
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References
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