Revisiting the Tragic Form: The Black Rape Tragedy in Contemporary African American Women's Drama

This dissertation introduces the "black rape tragedy" as represented in African American women's drama. Since the 1920s, a small body of tragedies written by black female playwrights has dramatized rape as an assault on black womanhood. While early examples of the black rape tragedy depict interracial rape as a source of economic viability or the fulfillment of sexual deviancies, contemporary tragedies written since the 1980s depict a dystopian vision of black America and its treatment of the black female body as a site of abuse. Elizabeth Brown-Guillory's Somebody Almost Walked Off With All of My Stuff (1989), Judith A. Jackson's WOMBmanWARS (1992), Dael Orlandersmith's Beauty's Daughter (1993) and Monster (1994), Velina Hasu Houston's Alabama Rain (1994), Aishah Rahman's Only in America (1997), Suzan-Lori Parks's In the Blood (1999), and Kia Corthron's Breath, Boom (2001) represent an evolved black rape tragedy that highlights intra-racial rape, ideologies of black male entitlement, and community descent as interconnected contributors to the black woman's demise.;To define the black rape tragedy, I use black feminist theory as well as anti-rape discourse associated with black feminist criticism. Also, I utilize established critical approaches to confront the Aristotelian prototypical tragedy that continues to serve as a primary basis for theories on the tragedy, particularly in regards to plot, audience, and characterization.