“A Ghost of the Future”: Racial (Mis)perception and Black Subjectivity in LeRoi Jones’s Dutchman

This chapter offers a reading of Amiri Baraka's 1964 play, Dutchman, focusing on its use of race icons to engage with white liberal response to racial uplift ideology and its implications for black subjectivity. The chapter considers Rashid Johnson's restaging of Dutchman and his assertion that his project creates an opportunity to find identity somewhere between “the narrative of struggle and the narrative of Negro Exceptionalism,” noting that it resonates in Baraka's (aka LeRoi Jones) contention that the struggle is as much about “the right to choose.” The chapter challenges claims that Dutchman relies upon essentialized blackness and the degradation of white femininity in order to prop up the identity of the African American protagonist, Clay. Instead, it argues that the play unpacks whiteness's investment in uplift ideology by employing a variety of cultural genealogies and practices to sketch identity, thus exposing the vulnerabilities of the African American Freedom Struggle era iterations of uplift ideology.

The Postblack Ethos in “Texts Out of Time”: Rosa Parks and the African American Freedom Struggle in Cultural Memory

This book challenges the cultural memory of the African American Freedom Struggle era that hinges on a master narrative focused on the “heroic period” of the Civil Rights Movement. It argues that this narrative limits the representation of African American identity within the Civil Rights Movement to Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest leadership in the segregated South and casts Malcolm X's advocacy of black nationalism and the ensuing Black Power/Arts Movement as undermining civil rights advances. Through an analysis of five case studies of African American identity staged in plays between 1959 and 1969, the book instead offers representations that engage, critique, and revise racial uplift ideology and reimagine the Black Arts Movement's sometimes proscriptive notions of black authenticity as a condition of black identity and cultural production. It also posits a postblack ethos as the means by which these representations construct their counternarratives to cultural memory and broadens narrow constructions of African American identity shaping racial discourse in the U.S. public sphere of the 1960s.

“One for Whom Bread—Food—Is Not Enough”: Beneatha Younger, Uplift Ideology, and Intellectual Freedom

This chapter offers a reading of Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun, arguing that it foregrounds the necessity for racial uplift ideology in the Younger family's pursuit of the American Dream, culminating in the occupancy of their new home in the all-white enclave of Clybourne Park. Hansberry also sketches the postblack ethos in her representation of Beneatha Younger, the younger sister of the play's protagonist, Walter Lee Younger, and her allusion to intraracial debates about the false opposition between intellectual and corporeal freedom. In her interrogation of racial uplift ideology and the patriarchy that often underwrites it, Beneatha offers an alternative mode of self-representation built upon the pursuit of intellectual freedom. The chapter highlights the issue at the core of Hansberry's representation: race-based oppression and how it impacts concerns of equal housing access, economic enfranchisement, and African American identity politics.

Prefiguring Postblackness in Charles Gordone’s No Place to Be Somebody: A Black Black Comedy in Three Acts

This chapter offers a reading of Charles Gordone's 1969 Pulitzer Prize–winning play, No Place to Be Somebody: A Black Black Comedy in Three Acts. Through No Place to Be Somebody, Gordone questions cultural memory's master narrative of the African American Freedom Struggle. The protagonist, Gabe Gabriel, is both playwright and “a solo black performer within the context of the play,” and the chapter situates his four solo performances within No Place to Be Somebody's onstage action as counternarratives to heroic era accounts of both the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the residential desegregation of the era. Gabriel refuses black identity's monolithic representation offered in both direct action protest and black cultural nationalism. He and Gordone offer black subjectivity as neither rooted in nor limited to cultural memory's binary opposition between civil rights heroism and Black Nationalist villainy.

“Ghost(s) in the House!”: Black Subjectivity and Howard Sackler’s The Great White Hope

This chapter examines the interplay of cultural memory and black subjectivity in Howard Sackler's 1967 play, The Great White Hope, by considering Rashid Johnson's 2006 photograph, Self Portrait Laying on Jack Johnson's Grave. Sackler drew his protagonist, Jack Jefferson, from events in the life of the nation's first African American heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, whose reign from 1908 to 1915 sparked racially motivated violence throughout the United States. The chapter reads The Great White Hope's representation of Jack Jefferson as both a critique of Progressive Era racial common sense and the continuing significance of racial uplift ideology in the then-current moment. It argues that Jefferson offers a mode of black identity that emphasizes interiority as an alternative to the dissemination of appropriate racial representations intended to counter the stereotypical images of African Americans circulating in the public sphere and subverts such representational tactics. Jefferson's signifying engagement with the public sphere endows him with a means of escape from the representational binary imposed upon him as well as refutes the racial hierarchy underwriting uplift ideology.

Postblackness’s Ancestors and Relatives or “The Past Pushing Us into the Present”

This coda discusses recent revivals of the five plays examined in this book. The plays have been staged in a range of venues over the last ten years. A Raisin in the Sun, for example, returned to Broadway in 2014 and earned a Tony award for the year's best revival of a play or musical. The other plays were revived Off-Broadway or in university or regional theaters. Critics reviewing the plays approached them as cultural artifacts, historicizing the productions and situating them as markers of a pivotal era in the nation's history and its narrative about race. In effect, the plays become a history lesson about the African American Freedom Struggle. But as they argued for the historical significance of the plays, they elided the representation of African American identity's complexities present in the play. In light of cultural memory's dialectic of remembering and forgetting in service of the narrative of the Freedom Struggle era, the coda urges a reconsideration of postblackness's literary genealogies.

Gathering Black Subjectivities and Cultural Memory in Alice Childress’s Wine in the Wilderness

This chapter frames Alice Childress's 1969 teleplay Wine in the Wilderness, as a counternarrative to cultural memory's master narrative of the African American Freedom Struggle era. Childress explores the intersections of class, race, and gender in Wine in the Wilderness's representations, situating the Harlem Civil Disturbance of 1965 during which the play takes place as a site enabling productive reflection on and reconsideration of the rhetorical and representational strategies underwriting some Black Arts cultural expression and, by extension, African American identity. The chapter argues that Wine in the Wilderness troubles blackness and disrupts the standard ideas associated with it, consequently creating a new meaning. The play's counternarrative constitutes black solidarity and black consciousness through its critique of the sometimes reductive gender and class ideologies underwriting certain strains of the Black Arts Movement's cultural production alongside an alternate history of black protest led by African American fraternal organizations.