'A song worth singin': From rituals of resistance to radical Black subjectivity in African American theater and performance

This study investigates African American theatre and performance as a site for decolonization of Black psyche. W. E. B. DuBois and Frantz Fanon were among the first intellectuals to explore both the fragmentation of "post-colonial condition" and the power of "double consciousness". This investigation enlarges the continuum of dialogue on these subjects by positing Black theater performance as both a site of critical engagement and as a methodology for the further study of African American culture.In the context of a theater production, the performance community forges connections from live expressions of ritual elements like music, song, and dance to engage creative and radical subjectivities within the interstitial spaces of culture. Radical subjectivity emerges when people who have been taught to see themselves as objects create and control their own lives and imaginations. Black theater and performances, unlike Black performances in mainstream music, television and film, brings to life the realities of continuous evolution and movement that are an integral part of any concept of oppositionality or subjectivity. In this process, it is necessary to understand how structures of domination work on one's own life, as "one develops critical thinking and critical consciousness, as one invents new, alternative habits of being and resists from that marginal space of difference inwardly defined" (Yearning 15).August Wilson and Aishah Rahman have created plays to be performed as dynamic manifestations of this type of "radical subjectivity" within the Black "postcolonial condition," using ritual elements as rituals of resistance. In the interest of exploring history, Africanist perspectives, and Black lifeworlds, ritual elements are set in place to assist in our navigation of the worlds we occupy within and beyond the performance place. The use of African American ritual elements in both theater performance and critical theory constitute the evolution of historical and contemporary "rituals of resistance" into locations of "radical subjectivity" in a reflexive intellectuality that bears all the markings of ritual in its ability to engage, serve a purpose and suggest spiritual connection within an audience community.