Politics and aesthetics, race and gender: Georgia Douglas Johnson's lynching dramas as black feminist cultural performance

Abstract

This essay identifies Georgia Douglas Johnson's use of Spirituals and choral configurations as key strategies in a black feminist cultural performance that negotiates debates surrounding the development of black theatre, provides new perspectives of gender roles, and performs important ideological work on race and racial violence in the New Negro era. Drawing on contemporary black feminist theory and African American cultural criticism, this essay considers the texts of A Sunday Morning in the South (c. 1925) and the newly recovered “A Bill to be Passed” (1938) as performance and reveals Johnson's plays as sites of cultural convergence in which race and gender intersect not only with each other but also with politics, aesthetics, and opposing theories of theatre. The recognition of Johnson's significance as a dramatist of the New Negro Era, and specifically as the most prolific playwright of lynching drama, is long overdue.