Staging Black Fugitivity by Stacie Selmon McCormick

Abstract

Reviewed by: Staging Black Fugitivity by Stacie Selmon McCormick Patrick Maley Stacie Selmon McCormick. Staging Black Fugitivity. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2019. 178 pp. $29.99. "We live in a present animated by slavery" (1). This is the first and most important sentence in Stacie Selmon McCormick's thoughtful and productive Staging Black Fugitivity, which examines how plays written by contemporary Black authors interrogate the resonance of American slavery. McCormick insists that playwrights like Tanya Barfield, August Wilson, Lydia Diamond, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Robert O'Hara, and Suzan-Lori Parks engage with slavery's lingering, domineering effects. McCormick shows persuasively how these playwrights complicate received orthodoxies, suggesting that their plays "engage in a counter-archival practice" (9). Staging Black Fugitivity argues that this process proves urgent in a contemporary world still violently disrupted by slavery's repercussions. The book's Introduction lays its theoretical groundwork and offers a short discussion of Barfield's Blue Door (2006), which McCormick shows to exemplify the existential quest at the center of her book's analysis. In order to comprehend his present struggles, Barfield's protagonist, Lewis, must engage with his ancestral past—both slavery and latter-day racial terror—as well as the nuances of his own Black experience. McCormick situates this and the book's subsequent discussions within the tradition of the neo-slave narrative, a concept that critics locate primarily in novels. By referencing plays like Amiri Baraka's Slave Ship (1967) and George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum (1986), McCormick establishes the neo-slave narrative as a valuable heuristic for theater, arguing that "black drama brings to bear embodiment as well as sonic and visual modes of representing slavery not fully available to the written neo-slave narratives" (7). From the outset, the book demonstrates how Black drama contributes to the process of unpacking slavery and its aftereffects. [End Page 258] In chapter one, McCormick defines fugitivity and taxonomizes its operation in the work of Black playwrights. She asserts that fugitivity emerges in Black drama when we see "the centering of black subjectivity more prominently in the telling of slavery," "the assertion that emancipation remains an ongoing and unfinished process," and "the troubling of notions of home" (23). The chapter offers four "categories for understanding the fluid approaches to fugitivity and slavery that each drama takes on" (27). These are "Revolutionary Fugitivity," which seeks to dismantle white supremacy; "Fugitive Time," which troubles temporality by injecting fluidity; "Black Feminist Fugitivity," which seeks liberation from racial and sexual objectification for Black women; and "Black Queer Fugitivity," which focuses on "black queer subjects beyond institutions—particularly educational, medical, and domestic—since they are founded on heteronormative constructs and have been historically hostile to queer subjects" (26, 79). The second chapter focuses on August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean (2003), arguing that the play "stands as a counter-monument to slavery in its attention to the implications for the ways we remember, misremember, or fail to remember this history" (55). In order to do this, McCormick invokes the notion of marronage, "a term that conceptualizes the psychological and physical act of formerly enslaved individuals existing outside of the society in order to live autonomously" (59). Set in 1904, the community of Gem includes ex-slaves and people born ostensibly free, a confluence that McCormick demonstrates is operative in Wilson's treatment of emancipation as a troubled process, not a singular proclamation. Collapsing the distance between Gem's setting and contemporary America, she argues convincingly that the play is "a demonstration of the practices of survival enacted by black Americans and their efforts to attain a modicum of freedom in a hostile nation" (76). Chapter three, "Performing Escape," examines how Lydia Diamond in Harriet Jacobs: A Play (2008) and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins in An Octoroon (2014) signify on the minstrel tradition to "enable black subjects to challenge confining racial constructions and ironically forward more expansive representations of blackness" (78). Both plays feature Black performers playing slave-era white characters, allowing the writers "to reveal all the ways discourses of slavery misrepresent black subjectivity and advance problematic conceptions of blackness that resonate in the present" (79). The escape McCormick references in her title is...