“This Could Go On Forever”: Rethinking the End in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Apocalyptic Dramas
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article argues that Suzan-Lori Parks’s dramatic work should be considered in terms of its presentation of apocalyptic scenes that are unique in their rejection of endings. I examine Parks’s The America Play and Death of the Last Black Man in the Entire World as examples of apocalypse-in-process, representations of apocalypse that refuse a teleological context and instead focus on the unending nature of historical and global catastrophe. I build upon scholarship on Parks’s treatment of African American history and memory, particularly that which centres her preoccupation with the material and psychical remnants of slavery and oppression, to examine how apocalyptic themes undergird her writing. Parks’s reorientation of apocalyptic writing away from easily resolvable endings speaks directly to our present moment, in which anti-Black violence borne out of chattel slavery continues to reverberate in the face of the insidious violence of microaggressions and police brutality. In presenting sites of ostensible death as unlikely spaces for insurgent life, Parks’s plays rethink what narratives of death and trauma can look like.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".