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Assistant Professor of English
Ph.D., Rutgers University
14 Sanborn House
soyica.diggs@dartmouth.edu
Interests
Soyica Diggs' interests are African America drama, literature, performance,
and culture, women's and gender studies. Her book project, From Repetition
to Reproduction: African American Performance, Drama, and History, argues
that African American drama presents strategies to interpret historical
evidence embedded in black performance (e.g. cakewalking, singing the blues,
and delivering a sermon). Her research has been supported by a Stanford
Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship, Mellon Dissertation and Summer Research
Fellowships, and a Robert W. Woodruff Library Fellowship.
Courses
English 67.6, August Wilson and Suzan-Lori Parks, 08S
This course examines Pulitzer Prize winning playwrights August Wilson
and Suzan-Lori Parks‘s written works. In the late 20th century Wilson and Parks
emerged as two African American playwrights who garnered significant critical
and commercial attention. This course investigates the distinctive elements of
African American drama in the late 20th century through the particular
aesthetics of two of American drama’s most notable playwrights. This course
considers how social, political, and artistic histories inform Wilson and
Parks’s drama. Therefore, we will locate the distinctive qualities of their
drama; how should we categorize their style, form, and content? Texts may
include: Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Fences, The Piano Lesson, Seven Guitars,
King Hedley II, The America Play, Topdog/Underdog, The Red Letter Plays, and
Getting Mother’s Body. In addition to Wilson and Parks’s plays and Parks’s
novel, we will read critical and theoretical works on drama and contemporary
African American cultural expression written by the playwrights and by cultural
critics. Dist: LIT, pending faculty approval. Course Group III. CA tags
Genre-drama, Cultural Studies and Popular Cultlulre, National Traditions and
Countertraditions.
Publications
"Dialectical Dialogues: Performing Blackness in the Drama of Alice
Childress," In Casebook on Contemporary African American Women
Playwrights. Ed. Philip Kolin. Forthcoming from Routledge (2007).
"Historicizing the Sound of a Ghastly Sight: James Baldwin’s Blues for
Mister Charlie?‚" In Sonic Interventions. Eds. Marijke de Valck,
Sylvia Mieszkowski and Joy Smith. Forthcoming from Amsterdam: Rodopi Press
(2007).
"Lorraine Hansberry," North American Women's Drama Collection, Alexander
Street Press, 2004.
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