Black Theatricality: Race and Representation in Black Literature and Culture

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The 2010 Bildner Symposium

Dartmouth College -April 9 and 10, 2010

Conference Organizers

Soyica Colbert's interests are black theatre, literature, performance, and culture, and women's and gender studies. Currently Colbert is working on two book projects. The first, Black Theatricality: Repetition/Reproduction, argues that through the twentieth century, African American dramatists utilize black performance (i.e. singing, dancing, or preaching) in their theaters and on their pages as acts of recuperation and restoration. The dislocation enacted by the trans-Atlantic slave trade created a perpetual sense of homeless for African Americans. Utilizing the physical space of the theater and the discursive one of the page, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, August Wilson and Suzan-Lori Parks deploy diverse types of performance to resituate black people in time and space. The playwrights create sites that have the potential to render repair. The second, Black Movements: Performance, Politics, and Migration, examines multiple meanings of movement (i.e. migration, immigration, community activism, and embodied performance) in black literature and cultural productions to bring studies of black diaspora into conversation with theorizations of black performance. She has published articles on James Baldwin, Alice Childress, and August Wilson.

Michael A. Chaney is an Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth College where he teaches courses on American and African American literature with an emphasis on visuality and visual culture, representations of slaves and slavery, and mixed race constructions of identity. He is the author of Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative as well as essays on racialization in contemporary cartoons, Ishmael Reed and cyborgs, Harlem Renaissance and globalization, and the pictorial intertexts of antebellum slave narrative. His published and forthcoming articles appear in American Literature, African American Review, Modern Fiction Studies, College Literature, and MELUS. He is currently working on editing a collection for Wisconsin University Press entitled Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and the Graphic Novel (Studies in Autobiography, William L. Andrews, series editor) and a second book project on nineteenth-century interracial affiliation.

Sam Vásquez is an Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth College. Her research and teaching interests include Caribbean and African American literature, particularly poetry and poetics, theories of humor, theories of the black diaspora, and diasporic visual culture. Her first book project, Tek Bad Sinting Mek Laugh: Black Diasporic Humor and the Negotiation of Western Canonical Strategies, explores diasporic writers’ use of laughter and appropriation to interrogate canonical Western texts as they offer alternative representations of black identity. Professor Vásquez is also at work on a manuscript that examines visual representations of black girlhood in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This project is tentatively entitled In Her Own Image: Visual and Literary Representations of Gender in the Black Diaspora. In addition to writing and publishing creatively, she has published critical essays on Louise Bennett, Aimé Césaire, and Carrie Mae Weems.