Comparative Study On Racial Otherness In The American Modern Theatre: Blackness In The Emperor Jones And Whiteness In Joe Turner's Come And Gone

Relatively few scholars have investigated racial representations in modern American drama. Even fewer scholars have analyzed depictions of whiteness in American letters, although "white studies" is slowly assumingly legitimacy in the academy in the 1990s. "Comparative Study on Racial Otherness in the American Modern Theatre" therefore attempts to bridge this gap in literary and critical studies by examining the black representation of Eugene O'Neill and the white representation of August Wilson. The work of both playwrights attests to their deep and consistent involvement with their racial other, who resurfaces in play after play. Maintaining that the United States resembles a postcolonial society, I advance my critical analysis by employing current theories of race ( blackness and whiteness) and postcolonial theory, specifically the contributions of Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi to this field, as well as those of many contemporary scholars like Edward Said, Stuart Hall, and Gayatri Spivak.Eugene O'Neill's early work promotes stereotypes of blackness, such as primitiveness and cannibalism, he has transcended his racial otherness in his later work and has discovered in the Negro a tragic character rather than an entertainer. The Emperor Jones draws attention to the postcolonial American economic, social, and political injustices affecting African-Americans while highlighting their consequent psychological and mental anguish. Wilson's fictive black world, as seen in Joe Turner's Come and Gone, on the other, is peopled with many whites, most of whom remain off-stage, but nevertheless play a tremendous role in the lives of his black characters. Wilson's vision of whiteness is homogeneous; he stresses in this play how whiteness is associated with economic power and exploitation, social privilege and law in the black imagination. I conclude my study by demonstrating how both dramatists confirm the colonial panorama Frantz Fanon delineates. While O'Neill explores the effects of "alienation" on colonized individuals decades before Fanon put forward his theories, Wilson turns his attention to the second stage of colonization: "nationalism."...