Reconstruction, Fugitive Intimacy, and Holding History

Abstract

This article examines how black playwrights affirm bodily autonomy by accounting for the status of the flesh – namely, legacies of injury and the unending potential for wounding. Examining Robert O’Hara’s Insurrection: Holding History (1999) and Marcus Gardley’s ...And Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi (2010), I contend that the plays imagine a relationship to the past that provides a basis for addressing contemporary wounding. They not only narrate material legacies of slavery for public reckoning but also offer hermeneutical and epistemological frameworks toward the realization of (black) freedom. This dual purpose demonstrates how narrative repair functions as a mode of reading as well as a mode of invention; when animated through theatricality, it creates what I call reconstruction.