Colored Contradictions Summary
Indiana State University
Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Plays. by Harry J. Elam,; Robert Alexander Review by: Robert Craig Baum African American Review, Vol. 31, No. 4, Contemporary Theatre Issue (Winter, 1997), pp. 732-735 Published by: Indiana State University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3042346 . Accessed: 14/02/2013 03:56
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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools …show more content…
"Mypoint is, we're all involved here,"RhodesiaJones'scharacterArtist tells her audience in Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women. Jones's authorial and the Artist'snarrativecommentarysituate the Americanprison system: the perverse number of women of color behind bars. And the struggle by these women to gain a political voice describescrises, resolutions,dislocations,and loving embraceswithin a continuum of intertextualspaces formedby the plays which experience.The Artist continues:"Mypoint describethe gay-African-American is, this ain't no time to be buying dogs and locking doors 'cause you see 'them' comin'. 'Cause 'they' could be 'us' and you may wake up and find that you've locked yourself in and they're sitting at your breakfasttable." My earlierad hoc use of the term editorialevent was not meant as a cutesy pomo flourish but an attempt to describean interesting(and ultimately dubious) Elam,a process of textual constructionI associatewith …show more content…
Why bring the readeralong for the ride only to leave him or her standing on the shoulder without a road map? Elam and Alexandercontributeto the collective shatteringof monolithic concepts of contemporaryAfrican-American dramaticrepresentation.Most importantly,they utilize dramaticnarrativeas a necessarysubstitutionfor deconstructingnotions of "objective" historicalproclamation(an objectivehegemony they associate with a dominantwhite culture)and instead assign for African-American playwrights and performersthe titles of historian,critic,and voices such as subjecttraditionallyassociated with non-African-American BertoldBrecht,William Shakespeare,George BernardShaw, EdwardAlbee, Henry David Hwang, Tony Kushner,and others. playwrights. I You will notice my deliberateomission of African-American suppose you could say that I am following Elam'smodel, for not only does he fail to convey with precision and ease the intricatephilosophicaland historical arguments generally associatedwith postmodern literaryand criticaldiscourse-the ideological dislocations,narrativereconfigurations, linguistic and syntacticalflourishes which empower and constituteemerging voices-but Elam also delinks his anthology (tacitlyor somewhat deliberately)from the very history it attempts to rewrite,reacquire,and ultimatelycelebrate-namely, the painstakinglyslow African-American externalreconstitution(BlackArts especially)
Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Plays. by Harry J. Elam,; Robert Alexander Review by: Robert Craig Baum African American Review, Vol. 31, No. 4, Contemporary Theatre Issue (Winter, 1997), pp. 732-735 Published by: Indiana State University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3042346 . Accessed: 14/02/2013 03:56
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools …show more content…
"Mypoint is, we're all involved here,"RhodesiaJones'scharacterArtist tells her audience in Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women. Jones's authorial and the Artist'snarrativecommentarysituate the Americanprison system: the perverse number of women of color behind bars. And the struggle by these women to gain a political voice describescrises, resolutions,dislocations,and loving embraceswithin a continuum of intertextualspaces formedby the plays which experience.The Artist continues:"Mypoint describethe gay-African-American is, this ain't no time to be buying dogs and locking doors 'cause you see 'them' comin'. 'Cause 'they' could be 'us' and you may wake up and find that you've locked yourself in and they're sitting at your breakfasttable." My earlierad hoc use of the term editorialevent was not meant as a cutesy pomo flourish but an attempt to describean interesting(and ultimately dubious) Elam,a process of textual constructionI associatewith …show more content…
Why bring the readeralong for the ride only to leave him or her standing on the shoulder without a road map? Elam and Alexandercontributeto the collective shatteringof monolithic concepts of contemporaryAfrican-American dramaticrepresentation.Most importantly,they utilize dramaticnarrativeas a necessarysubstitutionfor deconstructingnotions of "objective" historicalproclamation(an objectivehegemony they associate with a dominantwhite culture)and instead assign for African-American playwrights and performersthe titles of historian,critic,and voices such as subjecttraditionallyassociated with non-African-American BertoldBrecht,William Shakespeare,George BernardShaw, EdwardAlbee, Henry David Hwang, Tony Kushner,and others. playwrights. I You will notice my deliberateomission of African-American suppose you could say that I am following Elam'smodel, for not only does he fail to convey with precision and ease the intricatephilosophicaland historical arguments generally associatedwith postmodern literaryand criticaldiscourse-the ideological dislocations,narrativereconfigurations, linguistic and syntacticalflourishes which empower and constituteemerging voices-but Elam also delinks his anthology (tacitlyor somewhat deliberately)from the very history it attempts to rewrite,reacquire,and ultimatelycelebrate-namely, the painstakinglyslow African-American externalreconstitution(BlackArts especially)