Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal - The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture

Between 1935 and 1939, the United States government paid out-of-work artists to write, act, and stage theatre as part of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), a New Deal job relief program. In segregated "Negro Units" set up under the FTP, African American artists took on theatre work usually reserved for whites, staged black versions of "white" classics, and developed radical new dramas. In this fresh history of the FTP Negro Units, Kate Dossett examines what she calls the black performance community-a broad network of actors, dramatists, audiences, critics, and community activists-who made and remade black theatre manuscripts for the Negro Units and other theatre companies from New York to Seattle. Tracing how African American playwrights and troupes developed these manuscripts and how they were then contested, revised, and reinterpreted, Dossett argues that these texts constitute an archive of black agency, and understanding their history allows us to consider black dramas on their own terms. The cultural and intellectual labor of black theatre artists was at the heart of radical politics in 1930s America, and their work became an important battleground in a turbulent decade.

ISBN:	9781469654423
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Imprint:	The University of North Carolina Press
Published date:	28 Feb 2020
DEWEY:	792.08996073
DEWEY edition:	23
Language:	English
Number of pages:	368
Weight:	564g
Height:	154mm
Width:	234mm
Spine width:	25mm

Write a review

Your Name:

Your Review: Note: HTML is not translated!

Rating: Bad           Good

Enter the code in the box below: