“This Could Go On Forever”: Rethinking the End in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Apocalyptic Dramas

Abstract

This article argues that Suzan-Lori Parks’s dramatic work should be considered in terms of its presentation of apocalyptic scenes that are unique in their rejection of endings. I examine Parks’s The America Play and Death of the Last Black Man in the Entire World as examples of apocalypse-in-process, representations of apocalypse that refuse a teleological context and instead focus on the unending nature of historical and global catastrophe. I build upon scholarship on Parks’s treatment of African American history and memory, particularly that which centres her preoccupation with the material and psychical remnants of slavery and oppression, to examine how apocalyptic themes undergird her writing. Parks’s reorientation of apocalyptic writing away from easily resolvable endings speaks directly to our present moment, in which anti-Black violence borne out of chattel slavery continues to reverberate in the face of the insidious violence of microaggressions and police brutality. In presenting sites of ostensible death as unlikely spaces for insurgent life, Parks’s plays rethink what narratives of death and trauma can look like.