Sleep, Death's Twin Brother

Abstract

In this essay, I approach Suzan-Lori Parks's The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World from the perspective of postmodern drama so as to explore a number of key preoccupations of postmodern aesthetics in this play. I argue how the creation of indeterminacy enables Parks to develop an indeterminate representation of history and exercise the African Americans' resistance against the hierarchies of power. In addition, I argue that the use of postmodern aesthetics helps the playwright to create a postmortem state so as to proffer alternative perspectives, which can resist and eventually break the monophony and monopoly of the dominant discourse. I finally show how the employment of the theories of postmodern drama helps Parks to represent a typical image of a media-saturated society and to direct and throw her energies into undermining a number of dominant metanarratives, ill-propaganda, and negative stereotypes, which have been created by media and have afflicted African Americans in their personal and social lives. It is worth noting that the focus of my analysis is on the terrains that reflect the playwright's quest for identities for African Americans.1