The “Con” in Conspiracy: Racial Violence as Political Assassination in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog

Abstract

Abstract This article argues that Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer-prize winning play Topdog/Underdog (1999) mobilizes a conspiracy theory concept of anti-black violence in America. The highly discursive play depicts a pair of black brothers named Lincoln and Booth as they banter, argue, and compete with each other over games of three-card monte. In the final scene of the play, the brothers fulfil the destiny inscribed in their names: Booth shoots and kills his brother Lincoln after a dispute over their meager inheritance. The play frames this final act of brutal fratricide as a form of political assassination in order to activate the rescaling that comes with a conspiracy theory lexicon: Topdog/Underdog formulates a generative and radically resistant conspiratorial conception of anti-black violence that ultimately enables a genuine confrontation with the origins and structures of racialized oppression. The play thus belongs to a lineage of works by black writers that have wielded a paranoid aesthetic in order to galvanize a revolutionary opposition to the structures of racial oppression. This tradition includes authors such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and, most explicitly, John A. Williams, whose novel The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) emerges in the article as a precedent for the conspiratorial racial politics of Parks’s play. In its own interpretation of paranoid anti-racist critique, Topdog/Underdog elaborates a concept of conspiracy without intentionality whose hierarchies, despite being beyond the parameters of any single individual or collective entity’s agency, can nonetheless be undermined and, ultimately, toppled.