Sanayisiz Nesil: Lynn Nottage'ın Sweat Oyununda Bellek, Biyografi ve Beden

Abstract

American playwright Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Sweat (2017), is set in the town of Reading, Pennsylvania, and traces the life of a working-class community as they experience the devastating, multi-faceted effects of deindustrialization across the first decade of the twenty-first century. While concerned with the changing nature of American manufacturing under late capitalism, the play’s depiction of labor draws on a broader historical lens, and charts the intergenerational transmission of class inequalities over time. Nottage uses a series of formal and structural strategies to draw attention to how characters remember and narrate the past, and how these memories’ racial and gendered tensions ultimately constrain their efforts at mobilization. In its focus on memory, biography, and the body, Sweat not only participates in what has been called the recent deindustrialization literature, but also revisits some of the key aesthetic choices surrounding the depiction of capitalism in modern American drama.