The African American Theatrical Body

Soyica Colbert is an Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth College. She is currently working on two book projects entitled Black Movements: Performance, Politics, and Migration and Lorraine Hansberry: Activist and Artist. She has published articles on James Baldwin, Alice Childress, August Wilson, Lynn Nottage and Suzan-Lori Parks. President of the Black Theater Association, Founder of the New England Black Scholars Collective and member of the Modern Language Association, the Association of Theater in Higher Education, the American Studies Association and the American Society of Theater Research, Colbert is the recipient of a Woodrow Wilson Foundation Career Enhancement Fellowship (2010–2011), Walter and Constance Burke Research Awards (2007 and 2010), a Stanford Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship (2006–2007), a Mellon Summer Research Grant (2005) and the Robert W. Woodruff Library Fellowship (2005). Recent undergraduate classes include Black Theatre USA, Modern Black Literature, American Drama, Introduction to African American Studies, the Drama of August Wilson and Suzan-Lori Parks, Contemporary Playwrights of Color, and Race and Performance. Her research interests span the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, from William Wells Brown to Beyoncé, and from poetics to performance.

'This is a book of amazing historical scope and impressive critical imagination.' Harry J. Elam, Jr, Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University

• Overture: rites that render repairing: Suzan-Lori Parks' The America Play; 1. Repetition/reproduction: the DNA of black expressive culture: Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun; 2. Recuperating black diasporic history: W. E. B. Du Bois' The Star of Ethiopia; 3. Re-enacting the Harlem Renaissance: Zora Neale Hurston's Color Struck; 4. Resisting shame, offering praise and worship: Langston Hughes's Tambourines to Glory; 5. Resisting death: the blues bravado of a ghost: James Baldwin's Blues for Mister Charlie; 6. Rituals of repair: August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone; 7. Reconstitution: Suzan-Lori Parks' Topdog/Underdog; Epilogue: Black movements: Tarell Alvin McCraney's In the Red and Brown Water; Bibliography.