Representation Of History In The Plays Of Suzan-Lori Parks

In her drama African-American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks expresses ultimate concern for the mainstream American history, which has become fragmentary because of the exclusion of African Americans. This thesis examines Parks's representation of history in four plays, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, The America Play and Topdog/Underdog. In these plays Parks deconstructs the orthodox narrative in relation to African Americans in conventional American history and reconstructs an alternative version of African-American history.This thesis is divided into three chapters. The first chapter focuses on Parks's view towards the conventional American history and her imagination of the new history. Parks shows her dissatisfaction with the white historiography by reducing the American history to "the Great Hole of History," which symbolizes the absence of black voice in white narratives. To undermine it, Parks visualizes a new history which is circular and fluid.The second chapter discusses Parks's reconstruction of the great events in the African-American history in her plays, which includes the slave trade, the black emancipation and the Civil Rights Movement. In the newly shaped histories, Parks downplays the white-black conflict and reclaims the agency of the black peopleThe third chapter concentrates on the innovative language of Parks, especially her use of Rep & Rev, or repetition with revision. Parks's language is influenced by both Signifyin(g) in the black vernacular and Gertrude Stein's performative language. Using Rep & Rev, her language is not a representation but an action, assisting her to destabilize the conventional African-American history and perform her newly resurrected histories.Finally the thesis reaches the conclusion that Parks, disgusted at the old drama of oppression and the nostalgia-laden plays, endeavors to show various ways of defining and presenting blackness through deconstructing and reconstructing the American history.