The Device of Race: An Introduction

Abstract

Abstract As our title, African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader, suggests, this anthology explores the intersections of race, theater, and performance in America. The interactions among them are always dynamic and multidirectional. Accordingly, the social and historical contexts of production can critically affect theatrical performances of blackness and their meanings. At the same time, theatrical representations and performances have profoundly impacted African American cultural, social, and political struggles. This book argues that analyzing African American theater and performance traditions offers insight into how race has operated and continues to operate in American society. Significantly, this examination of African American theater and performance history reflects not only on the historical evolution and cultural development of racial representations but also on the continuity and continuum of performance theories and theatrical practices over time. Dramatic tropes, aesthetic and cultural images, artistic agendas, and political paradigms are repeated and revised as the past is continually made present, and the present is constituted in the African American past.