Ntozake Shange Research Articles

Postmodern Theatric[k]s: Monologue in Contemporary American Drama

Postmodern Theatric(k)s focuses on the voices that have emerged from American experimental theater of the 1960s, voices shaped by the culture of television, film, Pop Art, and rock music. Increasingly, these writers have brought a distinctly new approach to the use of monologue. Deborah Geis argues that in place of the psychological revelation of the Shakespearean soliloquy, these postmodern monologues play tricks by altering, suspending, or rupturing the narrative progress of a play. Character development through monologue is replaced by parody, theatricality, and con games. For some recent performance artists, the notion of character itself explodes, as monologue permits the performer to play at blurring the fictional and the autobiographical.The author begins by tracing the changing role of monologue from classical drama through the early modernists; she also pinpoints the connections between the off-Off- Broadway theater of the sixties and new uses of monologue. The focus then turns to several key American playwrights, including Sam Shepard and David Mamet. Geis shows how monologue, as a technique for giving voice to previously silenced speakers, has played a crucial role in works by feminist and African-American dramatists like Maria Irene Fornes and Ntozake Shange. The author closes with an examination of the works of Spalding Gray and Karen Finley, two performance artists whose monologues display unique efforts at boundary-crossing.As the first study of its kind on monologue in theatrical narrative and as a discussion of recent American playwrights from a comparative critical perspective, Postmodern Theatric(k)s will be of interest to specialists in dramatic theory and criticism, specialists in performance studies, and theater practitioners. The volume will also appeal to readers interested in literary theory, cultural studies, feminism, and performance art.Deborah Geis is Assistant Professor of English, Queens College, City University of New York.

An Examination of the Relationship Between Race and Gender in an Early Twentieth Century Drama: A Study of Angelina Weld Grimké's Play Rachel

Women playwrights before 1950 were full partners in theatre's protest against conditions for Blacks, whether in form of propaganda, folks plays or historical dramas. They also made unique perspective of Black women's reality a part of that protest. Not until mid-century, however, would their voices reach beyond their communities into highly competitive world of professional theatre.(1) Today when we think of black women playwrights names that come to mind are Ntozake Shange, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, and Adrienne Kennedy. The endeavors and inroads that these women have made and continue to make in drama could not have occurred without struggle and ground breaking works of early black women playwrights such as Angelina Weld Grimke, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, May Miller, Mary Burill, Myrtle Smith Livingston, Ruth Gaines-Shelton, Eulalie Spence, Zora Neale Hurston, and Marita Bonner. These black women playwrights, and several others, published over sixty plays and pageants in addition to writing several unpublished texts.(2) Yet, despite these achievements, black female playwrights of first half of twentieth century have often been overlooked and pushed aside regardless of their contributions to American and black theater. Extreme racial and gender oppression best explains why black female playwright was not recognized prior to 1950. Forces of racism and sexism erected barriers so that blacks, overall, could not achieve any significant status in American drama, and for black women playwriting as a profession was considered a male vocation.(3) Women, on other hand, were encouraged to pursue more acceptable, feminine genres such as poetry or fiction.(4) Being both black and female, therefore, limited black woman's progress as a playwright. Consequently, due to racial and gender barriers, work of black female playwrights was slow to emerge. Prior to Lorraine Hansberry's production of A Raisin in Sun on Broadway in 1959, black women dramatists were slow to evolve because of their limited access to staging their works and because of stereotypes they had to combat. Like their male counterparts, early black female playwrights were writing against stereotypical portrayals of blacks on stage by white playwrights. Commonly for black men, stereotypical images were those of comic buffoon, lazy shiftless Uncle Tom, and savage brute, while for black women there were sexless domineering mammy types, loose trolops, and tragic mulattoes. White-authored productions, such as minstrel shows, helped to enforce these distorted images of black people because they were most popular form of theater in America for nearly a century.(5) Moreover, even when white playwrights attempted to celebrate Negro, their endeavors only ended in reinscribing existing stereotypes. For example, white playwrights such as Eugene O'Neill, William Vaughn Moody, Marc Connelly, and Paul Green, all, at some point, used as their subject matter in an attempt to valorize black people. However, these well-intentioned white representations of black life and black people in drama did no more than reinforce stereotypes already fixed about blacks. Whether savage brute image changed to noble savage in Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones or if Negro themes were expressed in Paul Green's In Abraham's Bosom, the work of many white playwrights did not address experiences of Blacks in any serious way.(6) For this reason, it became important for both black female and male playwrights to re-create or re-invent reality in their plays in order to demystify white stereotypes of blacks. It was work of black women dramatists, however, which captured lives of black people as no white or black male playwright could.(7) They created a reality that brought in dynamic of gender in addition to focus on race in their works. …

Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writings

Turning on inspired interpretations of Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Ntozake Shange, "Workings of the Spirit" weighs current critical approaches to black women's writing against Baker's own explanation of the founding, theoretical state of Afro-American intellectual history. "Brilliant, and tenderly riveted to gratitude as an indispensable facet of analysis, Houston Baker arrives, yet again, bearing the loveliest flowers of his devotion and delight: thank God he's here!" June Jordan"

Moorings and Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Women's Literature.

Moorings Metaphors is one of the first studies to examine the ways that cultural tradition is reflected in the language figures of black women's writing. In a discussion that includes the works of Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ntozake Shange, Buchi Emecheta, Octavia Butler, Efua Sutherland, Gayl Jones, with a particular focus on Toni Morrison's Beloved and Flora Nwapa's Efuru, Holloway follows the narrative structures, language, figurative metaphors of West African goddesses African-American ancestors as they weave through the pages of these writers' fiction. She explores what she would call the cultural gendered essence of contemporary literature that has grown out of the African diaspora. Proceeding from a consideration of the imaginative textual languages of contemporary African-American West African writers, Holloway asserts the intertextuality of black women's literature across two continents. She argues the subtext of culture as the source of metaphor language, analyzes narrative structures linguistic processes, develops a combined theoretical/critical apparatus vocabulary for interpreting these writers' works. The cultural sources spiritual considerations that inhere in these textual languages are discussed within the framework Holloway employs of patterns of revision, (re)membrance, recursion--all of which are vehicles for expressive modes inscribed at the narrative level. Her critical reading of contemporary black women's writing in the United States West Africa is unique, radical, sure to be controversial.

Language Unbound: On Experimental Writing By Women (review)

Reviewed by: Language Unbound: On Experimental Writing By Women Elizabeth Hirsh Nancy Gray . Language Unbound: On Experimental Writing By Women. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1992. 183 pp. No price given. Language Unbound: On Experimental Writing By Women makes a spirited contribution to neo-empiricist thinking about female subjectivity and women writers "as such." It skillfully interrelates the work of three modernists—Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Dorothy Richardson—and three post-modernists—E. M. Broner, Ntozake Shange, and Monique Wittig—as experimentally achieving, despite man's historical monopoly on the means of self-representation, what Gray calls "an ungendered access to language" and thereby the inscription of specific, diverse female subjectivities. Using Teresa de Lauretis on the patriarchal logic of narrative and, as partial antidote, her rethinking of (female) experience as a dynamic, semiotic exchange between consciousness and environment, Gray argues that in the twentieth century it manifestly has been possible for women to "be themselves" and to write as such. This they have accomplished and continue to accomplish, but not by devising or discovering a so-called feminine language, one that dispenses with referential or semantic functions, is wholly new and other, or can be called common to women as such. Rather, certain [End Page 443] women writers, accepting language as it (already) is—"as itself"—have unbound it from categorical, oppositional thinking, from its traditional ideological function of reproducing male subjectivity in and as narrative, and indeed from dominance by any single aspect of its existence, symbolic or material. Their "experiments" neither transgress a norm nor evoke some kind of pre-Symbolic utopia—strategies often identified with female writers, but which for Gray remain symmetrically determined by the same logic that constitutes the phantom "Woman" as Man's eternal, silent Other. Indeed, Woman is the very phantom that haunts the woman writer, whether in the guise of Woolf's famous "Angel in the House" or as the privileged avatar of a still-androcentric poststructuralism. Gray's "Post-phantom" writers instead treat language as, in Stein's phrase, an "intellectual recreation" that requires above all rigorous attention, like Stein "using everything" about language without respect for its mythic-ideological status as Law—that which makes it (appear as) the matrix of an exclusively male Subject, but which also succumbs to the craft of alert language users. The acts of attention solicited by their work are a kind of knowing disengaged from the Subject's traditional quest for knowledge as possession. Gray registers her own necessary involvement as a particular female reader in such processes of knowing, foregrounding her own attending "I" in a critical idiom that moots the distinction between style and method, and between formal and informal inquiry. Stein is an excellent model of uncategorical writing and point of reference for analyzing the primacy of experience and linguistic practice among her peers. But Gray's own discourse is not quite "simple through complexity" (Stein's, and apparently her own, ideal): it remains simply complex, I think because it is not complex enough—her brilliant theoretical turns frequently restated but not fully theorized, her readings brilliant but not really historicized (despite her own emphasis on the contextual nature of experience). The book, nonetheless, is rich and important reading for theorists and feminists of all stripes. Elizabeth Hirsh University of South Florida Copyright © 1993 Purdue Research Foundation

The dialectics of our America: genealogy, cultural critique, and literary history

Joining the current debates in American literary history, Jose David Saldivar offers a challenging new perspective on what constitutes not only the canon in American literature, but also the notion of America itself. His aim is the articulation of a fresh, transgeographical conception of American culture, one more responsive to the geographical ties and political crosscurrents of the hemisphere than to narrow national ideologies. Saldivar pursues this goal through an array of oppositional critical and creative practices. He analyzes a range of North American writers of color (Rolando Hinojosa, Gloria Anzaldua, Arturo Islas, Ntozake Shange, and others) and Latin American authors (Jose Marti, Roberto Fernandez Retamar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and others), whose work forms a radical critique of the dominant culture, its politics, and its restrictive modes of expression. By doing so, Saldivar opens the traditional American canon to a dialog with other voices, not just the voices of national minorities, but those of regional cultures different from the prevalent anglocentric model. The Dialectics of Our America, in its project to expand the “canon” and define a pan-American literary tradition, will make a critical difference in ongoing attempts to reconceptualize American literary history.

Taking center stage: feminism in contemporary U.S. drama

Successor to the author's ground-breaking Feminist Drama (1979; hailed by CHOICE as ...an admirable example of the new feminist scholarship), this new book describes the evolution of contemporary American feminist thought since that volume appeared and traces its themes in a cross-section of contemporary plays. Brown develops new and more encompassing definitions of feminism and feminist drama applicable to the wealth of theory and drama that has appeared since 1979. Giving voice to silenced women, glorifying those defined by the patriarchy as marginal, and propounding a feminist ethic based on respect for the environmental context and for the concrete, everyday world are among the central concerns of the new feminist drama. Plays by Jane Chambers, Caryl Churchill, Darrah Cloud, Kathleen Collins, Holly Hughes, Marsha Norman, David Rabe, Ntozake Shange, and Jane Wagner receive close textual analysis in the book.

Undeclared war: African-American women writers explicating rape

African-American women have continually battled the stereotypical belief that their loose sexuality encourages and contributes to men's physical abuse of their bodies. African-American writers combat this detrimental image of Black women's sexuality through their literary representation of the act of rape, examining the ways in which a patriarchal society uses rape to force women to conform to its dictates. Poets, such as Jayne Cortez, Ntozake Shange, and June Jordan accurately render rape as a battle that takes place on and over women's bodies. They introduce an international perspective and demonstrate the commonality of women's struggle, providing a model for women to identify the war and name the battle.

Unmasking the Minstrel Mask's Black Magic in Ntozake Shange's "spell #7"

. the minstrel may be banned as racist / but the minstrel is more powerful in his deformities than our alleged rejection of him,' writes Ntozake Shange in her foreword to spell #7. In the foreword, she reveals that the audience at the original production of the choreopoem at the New York Shakespeare Festival (1979) failed to detect her ironic, critical use of the minstrel tradition; rather, they delighted in and grandly applauded2 the familiar spectacle of the minstrel's singing, dancing, and posing as Al Jolson and Bert Williams. Minstrelsy, then, had not lost its psychic power or its entertainment value for the dominant culture. As Tania Modleski points out, the minstrel tradition is still operative in contemporary Hollywood films.3 If minstrelsy is still a popular form of entertainment, what constitutes the pleasurable appeal of this banned form of theatrical performance?

Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing

Turning on inspired interpretations of Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Ntozake Shange, "Workings of the Spirit" weighs current critical approaches to black women's writing against Baker's own explanation of the founding, theoretical state of Afro-American intellectual history. "Brilliant, and tenderly riveted to gratitude as an indispensable facet of analysis, Houston Baker arrives, yet again, bearing the loveliest flowers of his devotion and delight: thank God he's here!" June Jordan"

Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory

In the shifting and conflicting currents of recent cultural criticism, no space is more ambiguous or difficult to define than that held by black feminism. In this new book, Michele Wallace poses the historical and conceptual questions which an emergent black feminist theory address. The author begins with a consideration of the work of her mother, the artist Faith Ringgold, and moves on to recollections of her own early life in Harlem, and an account of her development as a writer in the 1970s. She examines the collective legacy with which black artists - from Zora Neale Hurston and Ntozake Shange, to Spike Lee and Michael Jackson - must contend in carving out a distinctive cultural practice. Wallace's book marks a new departure in contemporary criticism, as she combines the flair of a popular journalist with the rigor of a committed scholar. Invisibility Blues is certain to become a landmark in cultural studies and a fundamental document in the history of black feminism.

Down from the mountaintop: black women's novels in the wake of the civil rights movement, 1966-1989

In the years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, African-American women have contemplated the struggle for racial justice in an outpouring of novels. this book offers interpretations of 18 of these novels - including works by Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange and others - examining how they relate to the movement, to the conditions that fostered it and to its failure to achieve educational, economic and social equality.

Workings of the spirit: the poetics of Afro-American women's writing

Turning on inspired interpretations of Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Ntozake Shange, Workings of the Spirit weighs current critical approaches to black women's writing against Baker's own explanation of the founding, theoretical state of Afro-American intellectual history. Brilliant, and tenderly riveted to gratitude as an indispensable facet of analysis, Houston Baker arrives, yet again, bearing the loveliest flowers of his devotion and delight: thank God he's here! June Jordan

Women's Writing in Exile , and: Gender & Theory, Dialogues on Feminist Criticism (review)

Reviewed by: Women's Writing in Exile, and: Gender & Theory, Dialogues on Feminist Criticism Carolyn Burke Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram , eds. Women's Writing in Exile. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989. 442 pp. $39.95 cloth; pb. $13.95. Linda Kauffman , ed. Gender & Theory, Dialogues on Feminist Criticism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. 258 pp. $49.95 cloth; pb. $15.95. Judging by the ways in which current feminist debates are engaged in these two collections, the simplistically framed conflicts of the Seventies and Eighties—between theory as "male" and "experience" as female—have given way to more complex and reciprocal models of consciousness, language, and the articulation of personal experience in literary form. Women's Writing in Exile gathers a diverse set of essays on "exilic texts" by twentieth-century women. They analyze displacements from a "mother" country that are either politically enforced or voluntarily chosen, as well as the more metaphorical banishments of those "exiled less by geography than according to received literary criteria." Many of these essays are doubled by their authors' sense of professional displacement: as Jane Marcus puts it, the feminist critic writes from an odd position, "aware of her own estrangement from the center of her discipline, awkwardly measuring just how much marginalization she is willing to bear, negotiating dangerous identifications with her subjects." The first section, "Communities of Exile," begins with Shari Benstock's reconsideration of female modernism, which, she asserts, is not the underside of (male) modernism's literary terrain (pace Sandra Gilbert)—but, rather, "the excluded other within the law that ensures the law's operation," the "internal seam . . . in the Modernist fabric . . . that expatriation allowed to be externalized through writing." As if to illustrate female modernism's complex implication in the patriarchal codes from which its practitioners sought refuge, Mary Lynn Broe attempts a modernist collage on the troubled dynamics of incest as exile and "exilic" textual strategies in the writing of Djuna Barnes, Emily Coleman, and Antonia White. In more familiar discursive style, Susan Friedman's essay unfolds the personal, social, and spiritual reasons behind H.D.'s voluntary exile, whereas Judith Gardiner explores the ambivalent "exhiliration" of exile for Jean Rhys, Christina Stead, and Doris Lessing, in whose work England is both the center of culture and the locus of imperialism. Other essays examine the textual consequences of Isak Dinesen's return from Africa to Denmark and of African-American writers' (including Ntozake Shange, Gloria Naylor, and Alice Walker) different depictions of their characters' quests for spiritual asylum. Section Two, "The Canons of Exile," looks at the work of writers whose exiles, in a more metaphorical sense, result from the exclusions imposed by genre definitions, publication practices, and the politics of literary criticism. Particularly challenging essays include Sonia Saldívar-Hull's discussion of feminist critics' blindness to racism and classism in the writing of Gertrude Stein, Celeste Schenck's related argument that writers who used traditional meters have been "exiled by genre" from the newly constructed high modernist canon, and Jane Marcus' reminder that the "elsewhereness" of women's exiles should not be read as providing alibis for lack of critical (and ethical) responsibility. The third section, "The Politics of Exile," includes analyses of gender and colonialism in Anglo-Indian fiction, women's literary dissections of fascism in Britain, Germany, and Spain, and Nadine Gordimer's complex treatment of exile, both external and internal, in Burger's Daughter. [End Page 662] Just when each section seems to hint at tentative conclusions, the reader is further unsettled by the voices of four differently "placed" feminist critics (Annette Kolodny, Esther Fuchs, and Sneja Gunew in dialogue with Gayatri Spivak), whose remarks about personal and professional displacement underscore the problems inherent in any idealization of female liminality. However, although the Introduction states that the collection seeks neither to propose a definitive theory of exile nor to privilege the marginalized subject (whether writer or critic), several authors show little awareness of the discrepancies in their critical enterprise. Many of the pieces in Gender & Theory are more complexly motivated by questions of status within the profession. Kauffman selected these essays to "interrogate the interrelations of feminism and critical theory...

Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America.

Foreword by Margaret Walker Alexander Black Tradition and Women Playwrights of the Harlem Renaissance Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, Ntozake Shange: Carving a Place for Themselves on the American Stage Tonal Form: Symbols as Shapers of Theater of Struggle Structural Form: African American Initiation and Survival Rituals Mirroring the Dark and Beautiful Warriors: Images of Blacks The African Continuum: The Progeny in the New World Afterword by Gloria T. Hull Selected Bibliography Index

"She Want It All": The Sun Goddess in Contemporary Women's Poetry

It is expected of conventions that they be invisible-or visible only when broken. So it is with odd notion that sun is an emblem of masculinity, phallic power, yang force. Odd, that is, to Japanese, Ainu, Koreans, Siberians, Australians, Germans, Scandinavians, Lithuanians, Finns, Cherokee, Eskimo, Toba, Achomawi, and others to whom sun is female. To them, same physical object that in our literature so naturally, so unquestionably represents the solar principle, virile, intellectual, lucid' becomes to them Dearest Goddess, more important than God, who provides not only warmth and colors of rainbow, but good as well.2 To them, radiant power means not man but woman. So, too, to Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, Ntozake Shange, and other contemporary women poets, who break literary convention of at least a thousand years by introducing a female sun into their works. Sometimes this goddess is celebratory:

In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights by David Savran (review)

Book Reviews banishment of actor/audience barriers, the Handke-like assaults on the audience and Beckettian reflexivity of language. Throughout the book Roudan6 successfully argues for Albee's optimism. He quotes the playwright on his "plays unpleasant": If I were a pessimist I wouldn't bother to write. Writing itself, taking the trouble, communicating with your fellow human beings is valuable, that's an act of optimism. There's a positive force within the struggle. Serious plays are unpleasant in one way . - -. tiranother. Roudane moves freely and gracefully in and around his thorough research with a confident familiarity with the mass of secondary criticism on Albee and a rewarding intimacy with the plays. He also offers-thorough primary and secondary bibliographies and useful biographical material. Understanding Edward Albee will prove a valuable addition to academic libraries. LYNDA HART, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA DAVIDSAVRAN. In TheirOwII Words: COnlemporaryAmericanPlaywrighls. New York: Theatre Communications Group 1988. Pp. 320, illustrated. $24.95; $12.95 (PB). David Savran offers 20 original interviews with playwrights who met with him between fall 1986 and early spring 1987 in such places as the Ibiza Restaurant, the Royal Pacific Motor Inn, and studios, lofts, and townhouses in the Big Apple. Interviewing playwrights who "have written a significant body of work (as opposed to one widely perfonned play) and [who] remain at the peak oftheir creative activity," Savran includes five women (Maria Irene Fornes, Joan Holden, Emily Mann, Marsha Norman, and Megan Terry), two blacks (Charles Fuller and August Wilson), one Asian American (David Hwang), two Hispanics, (Luis Valdez and Fornes - 1 give her double billing), and eleven white males (Lee Breuer, Christopher Durang, Richard Foreman, John Guare, David Marnel, Richard Nelson, David Rabe, Wallace Shawn, Stephen Sondheim. Michael Weller, and Lanford Wilson). Sam Shepard, alas, refused Savran's invitation. Some may quarrel with Savran for n'ot choosing more women, especially black women (Beth Henley, Karen Malpede, Adrienne Kennedy, Ntozake Shange) or survivors from the 1960s (Ronald Ribman, Terrence McNally), but on balance Savran satisfyingly fulfills his goal of presenting playwrights who "personify the diversity of American theatre." Each interview. Savran tells us, lasted approximately 90 minutes, and "all were edited and cut, some quite heavily." Obviously Savran did not regard the transcript as an inviolate text but, like a director. reshaped the playwright's initial, no doubt rough, scripts, To each playwright Savran posed a series of "general" questions on early Book Reviews experiences in the theatre, training. influences, working practices, "attitudes toward the critics," views of the American theatre, and "goals for the future." The playwrights' answers about the critics grow stale, but the other questions frequently elicit entenaining and illuminating responses. Savran, though, is at his best when he breaks away from these predetennined queries to ask follow~up questions or leads the playwrights into interpretations of their own works. Memorable examples are Rabe on his affection for Eddie in Hurlyburly, Nonnan on foreign productions of 'night Mother (in Scandinavia "the daughters are Valkyries towering over those little Mamas"), or Durang on Sister Mary Ignatius ("Mother Teresa doesn't belong in this play"), Savran gets each playwright to define his/her art, sometimes in one or two sentences. Whether this laconic self~analysis is the result of Savran's editing or his talent as an interviewer I do not know, but he does achieve quotable results. America's leading documentary playwright, Mann observes "1 love courtrooms." Terry's pronouncement "I am all feeling" contrasts with Fornes's "I don't romanticize pain." August Wilson holds that "All my plays are political" without being didactic. Weller's sense of theatre ("When. go to the theatre now. I get antsy at small plays. IfI see there are three people in the cast, [go 'Oh Lord.' What if[ don't like them?") rebuts Nonnan's ("[ really believe that plays can be about one person. I've tried ... to break this rule and make plays about two people or about groups. The audience will subvert this every time.") There is much valuable information here about the playwrights' lives, most notably the.if lives in the theatre. Durang reveals that he would not let Belle arid Boo be perfonned until his father...

Evolving a Multicultural Tradition

I want to go through a sort of personal progression that has taken place in myself and is also reflected in my work. I think I evolved from a place where I had a complete and honest non-awareness of issues of people of color, to the place where I am now-which is continuing to evolve, but is closer to some sort of multicultural model. When I first started writing plays I had no particular desire to write about myself as an Asian American or as a person of color. Perhaps as a result of that the first few plays I wrote, which are either in a drawer of mine or buried someplace, nobody's ever seen. At a certain point I started to awaken to issues of color, in the late '70s when I was an undergraduate in college. Partially this was through the awareness of works by Asian Americans who had come before me. Directly as a result of people like Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston and other non-Asian writers like Ntozake Shange, I became aware of the possibility of opening up this side of myself in my work. When I wrote my first play, F.O.B., to some extent it was an attempt to validate the existence of a previous Asian American literary tradition, through an exploration of two mythological characters: Fa Mu Lan, from Maxine Hong Kingston's book The Woman Warrior, and a character named Kwan Gung, the god of the writers, warriors, and prostitutes from Frank Chin's play Gee, Pop. I thought it was interesting to try to bring these two characters together in Torrance, California, in the same way that Stoppard took Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Hamlet and made another play out of it, bringing about a certain cross-fertilization. At the same time I became very interested in trying to create a form which would make sense, in terms of this new content. At the time my choice was to create some kind of fusion of Asian and Western theater.

Reclaiming Women's Language, Imagery, and Experience: Ntozake Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo

Reclaiming Women's Language, Imagery, and Experience: Ntozake Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo

Black Women Playwrights: Exorcising Myths

A LICE CHILDRESS, Lorraine Hansberry, and Ntozake Shange, three outstanding contemporary black women playwrights, are crucial links in development of black women playwriting in America. These three playwrights, whose perspectives and portraits are decidedly different from those of black males and white playwrights, have created images of blacks which dispel myths of the contented slave, the tragic mulatto, the comic Negro, the exotic primitive, and the spiritual singing, toe-tapping, faithful servant. Childress, Hansberry, and Shange have created credible images of blacks, such as the black militant, the black peacemaker, the black assimilationist, the optimistic black capitalist, the struggling black artist, and the contemporary black matriarch. However, three images which appear most frequently in plays of these black women are the black male in search of his the black male as a walking wounded and the evolving black woman. The black male in search of his manhood, a product of ambivalence fostered mainly by continued disinheritence of blacks after World War II and Korean War, is a major new image in contemporary literature. Functioning in this role, black male struggles to realize who he is and what his function in life is to be. In his essay, Visions of Love and Manliness in a Blackening World: Dramas of Black Life from 1953-1970, Darwin T. Turner states: