Sistuhs in the Struggle: An Oral History of the Black Arts Movement Theatre and Performance by La Donna L. Forsgren

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sistuhs in the Struggle: An Oral History of the Black Arts Movement Theatre and Performance by La Donna L. Forsgren Le’mil L. Eiland Sistuhs in the Struggle: An Oral History of the Black Arts Movement Theatre and Performance. By La Donna L. Forsgren. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020; pp. 376. La Donna Forsgren’s Sistuhs in the Struggle: An Oral History of the Black Arts Movement Theatre and Performance is the first history to highlight Black women intellectuals of the Black Arts Movement, which explicitly melded artistic expression with Black racial pride during the 1960s and ’70s as a challenge to white supremacy in the United States. Historiography on the Black Arts Movement is often male-dominated with a genealogy crediting figures like Ed Bullins, Amiri Baraka, and Larry Neal. Countering the logic that Black feminist drama was tangential to the movement, Sistuhs in the Struggles organizes a plethora of Black women artists to explain how they developed their Black aesthetics, nourished the racial politics of the Black Arts Movement, and advanced the genre of Black feminist drama. Centering these Black women’s artistic contributions, Forsgren offers a new perspective on the intertwining gender and race politics of the movement. Sans neat conclusions, Sistuhs in the Struggle examines the individual contributions of Black women intellectuals of the Black Arts Movement, their inspirations and accolades, and their methods for navigating sexism and racism. Forsgren’s project offers wonderful firsthand accounts of women in the Black Arts Movement and their legacies as their aesthetics informed various arenas of theatre and performance. In addition to providing a window into the movement, through these interviews Forsgren archives not only their aesthetic practices, but the politics that informed their work. She interviews a range of artists, some iconic like Ntozake Shange, Sonia Sanchez, Micki Grant, and Jackie Taylor, and some lesser known like Dawn Alli and Nora Cole. What began as a project to include nineteen interviews expanded to include the contributions of their dearly departed sistuhs, such as founder of Harlem’s National Black Theatre Barbara Ann Teer, as interviewees acknowledged her contributions to theatre. Forsgren was wise in including Black women intellectuals working on and behind the stage. In particular, her interview with Kathy Perkins reveals how distinct gender and racial politics impacted her career in lighting design. Each of the four chapters includes edited fragments of interviews, but concludes to resemble a roundtable of familiar scholars or an intimate space where women of your family gather. Each chapter orbits around a distinct concept in an effort to expand the discussion of Black women’s artistic contributions to Black theatre and performance. Chapter 1, “Spiritual Sister: The Black Aesthetic, Feminism, and Black Power,” explores the melding of and, sometimes, tensions between Black art, feminism, and Black Power politics. Chapter 2, “Black Theaters Matter: The Art of Institution Building,” charts how institutions like the Harlem Children’s Theatre Company, the Black Ensemble Theatre of Chicago, and the National Black Theatre of Harlem advance Black theatre on a regional and national stage. Chapter 3, “‘Traveling with Ears to the Ground’: Black Arts Movement Drama, Ritual, Teleplays, and Musicals,” explores various women’s transition from playwrighting to writing for television and Broadway, off-Broadway, and musical theatre. Chapter 4, “Performative Embodiment on Black Arts and Alternative Stages,” provides a glimpse into artists’ performance practices in front of and behind the stage. Forsgren’s methodology intertwines Black feminist oral history with critical performance ethnography to interrogate the “relationship between the Black aesthetic, performance, and Black empowerment” (5). Building off Dwight Conquergood’s praxis of witnessing, Forsgren includes her own responses to and commentary on the interview process and reflections on how her presence shaped her respondents’ engagement and candidness. This project also illuminates how Black women artists developed their art in dialogue with one another. Forsgren intentionally arranges the interview transcripts so that she shows multiple perspectives on (and sometimes disagreements about) a single issue or event. For example, some women like Shange associate themselves with the feminist movement, whereas others such as Doris Derby intentionally distance themselves from [End Page 202] feminism and define themselves as “womanist.” This book highlights disagreements among the...