From repetition to reproduction: African American drama in the African American literary tradition

From Repetition to Reproduction: African American Drama in the African American Literary Tradition examines modes of black performance in African American drama, literature, and culture. The recovery of histories and memories is one of the primary pursuits of African American Literature. African American writing communicates its intense preoccupation with history and memory by employing performative tropes, the blues being an iconic example, which communicate praxis for knowing histories that exceed linguistic modes of representation. Primarily evocative of a feeling rather than a language, the blues as idiom demonstrates an alternative representational field. My dissertation argues that African American drama demonstrates ways to interpret submerged psychic and material histories embedded in black performance. These histories bend the shape of History transforming it from an arrow to a boomerang---a shape that corresponds to the recurrence of historical events.