Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A Casebook (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A Casebook Dana A. Williams Philip C. Kolin, ed. Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A Casebook. Casebooks on Modern Dramatists Series. London: Routledge, 2007. Pp. v +207. $120.00 (Hb). Contemporary African American Women Playwrights is a welcome addition to the field of scholarship on black women playwrights. Despite the obvious and overwhelming impact they have had on American theatre, on African American theatre, on American and African American culture and literature in general, too little attention has been paid to their contributions. There are few single-authored books that focus on a single playwright, and there are even fewer single-authored books that focus on black women playwrights collectively. Although it is a collection of essays rather than a book with a single author, as the first critical volume to examine this cadre of writers, Contemporary African American Women Playwrights is perhaps a step in that direction. Excepting David Krasner’s essay on Gloria Douglas Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Marita O. Bonner, and Lorraine Hansberry, which attempts to provide a historical context for the emergence of contemporary black women playwrights, each of the essays in the collection focuses on a particular dramatist. Krasner chooses Johnson, Hurston, and Bonner as representative writers who connect Hansberry to the Harlem Renaissance; subsequently, he recognizes Hansberry as a foremother to contemporary black women playwrights. Especially useful is his commentary about Johnson’s interaction with Alain Locke and his engagement with the performance aspect of Hurston’s plays. Soyica Diggs’s essay on Alice Childress offers a thoughtful and important commentary on Childress’s anticipation of the Black Arts Movement and on the ways Childress’s plays can be used to investigate performance in general and the performance of race in particular. Jacqueline Wood’s essay on Sonia Sanchez examines Sanchez’s role in the development of black women’s dramatic literature. Wood focuses on Sanchez’s militant dramas in particular, with useful close readings of Sister Son/ji; Uh Huh, But How Do it Free Us?; Dirty Hearts; and I’m Black When I’m Singing, I’m Blue When I Ain’t. An Adrienne Kennedy scholar, Kolin contributes to the collection a sharp essay on Kennedy, with close readings of Kennedy’s plays, paying special attention to the historical context out of which they emerge. James Fisher’s essay on Ntozake Shange presents a good examination of Shange’s dramatic works and articulates the influence of her works on subsequent plays and dramatic forms, while Beth Turner’s essay on Pearl Cleage offers a revealing analysis of selected Cleage plays, unveiling Cleage’s under-examined role as a playwright. Brandi Wilkins Catanese’s [End Page 131] essay focuses on Aishah Rahman’s plays. Catanese offers a close reading of Unfinished Women Cry in No Man’s Land While a Bird Dies in a Gilded Cage, but she also discusses a number of Rahman’s other full-length plays in her discussion of three recurrent themes in Rahman’s works –black iconography, black spirituality, and black gender politics. Freda Scott Giles contributes an important essay on Glenda Dickerson and her works, highlighting how Dickerson has not only moved between, but brought together, the academy and the professional theatre. Giles also traces Dickerson’s academic and cultural development as a playwright and director and engages with the historical underpinnings that inform Dickerson’s plays. Joan Wylie Hall’s essay on Anna Deveare Smith examines Smith’s theatre pieces as attempts to encourage audiences to identify with the “other.” Hall examines race and gender in Smith’s Fires in the Mirror, culture in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, and history in House Arrest. Debby Thompson traces Suzan-Lori Parks’s emergence as a playwright and offers “archeological readings” (invoking Foucault) of Parks’s plays, in general, and of Venus, in particular. Sandra Shannon’s essay on Lynn Nottage identifies recurring themes in Nottage’s plays, with a cursory look at selected plays. Shannon’s interview with Nottage discusses Nottage’s thoughts about being labelled an African American playwright, her understanding of the need for balance between entertainment and political artistry, her relation to Yale’s school of drama and...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".