The “Atmos-Feeling” of Resurrection: Feeling Black (Not Slave) in Black Arts Movement Drama

Abstract

This article explores performances of slavery and the afterlife of slavery in drama of the 1960s and 1970s Black Arts Movement. I use Amiri Baraka’s theory of “atmos-feeling” as a means of analysing the Black Arts Movement’s undoing of the equation of the black body and the slave body. Through an analysis of a wide range of plays ( The Slave, Slave Ship, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf, and Funnyhouse of a Negro), I uncover the differences between the Black Arts Movement framing of slavery and twenty-first-century Afro-pessimism.