Family Memory on Stage
11. Conclusion: Re-Thinking the African-American Literary Canon
During my research stay at Yale University, USA, in 2010, I attended a class taught by renowned poet and scholar Elizabeth Alexander that was entitled “Rethinking the African-American Literary Canon.” According to the course description, the aim was “to consider, discuss, and revise some of the touchstones of the African-American canon,” re-reading works considered canonical “with fresh eyes.” Including authors from 18th-century Phillis Wheatley to writer-activist James Baldwin and Nobel Prize-winning Toni Morrison, the selected text corpus mainly consisted of novels, short stories, essays, and poems. The syllabus included a total of eighteen works, out of which only Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, August Wilson’s Fences and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone were dramatic texts. For a term project, the students were asked to “present a work not on the syllabus and argue for its necessity to African-American literary study.” In this sense, the present study has aimed to show that a re-thinking of the African-American literary canon should also include a re-assessment of 20th-century African-American theater by female playwrights. The lack of research on many of the plays and playwrights considered here suggests that a large number of works are still waiting to be saved from obscurity.
Drawing on major theories of cultural and memory studies, the analysis has argued for the cultural significance of 20th-century African-American female playwrights and their dramatic work by focusing on the cultural performance of time and memory and its influence on the representation and construction of African-American identity on stage. It has shown that the black American characters’ self-understanding and self-creation are embedded within a cultural performance of a remembered time that is defined in and through memory. In order to constitute and confirm their identities, the characters integrate themselves into a genealogical chain, establishing a continuum of time that links the past to the present and the future. The significance of this culturally specific
representation and interpretation of black time becomes especially obvious when compared to the notion and experience of time in modernity.
In the modern age, the experience of time has become inextricably linked to notions of rupture, progress, and change. Pointing to the notion and experience of time as social constructions, several scholars have shown that concepts of modern time are characterized by an emphasis on the aspects of acceleration and a constant process of renewal. Hermann Lübbe, for example, speaks of a “Gegenwartsschrumpfung,”350 a constriction of the present moment, arguing that the meaning and significance of the present are continually decreasing due to an accelerated process of social and cultural change. Similarly, Reinhart Koselleck points out that the ever-increasing acceleration of time is a characteristic phenomenon of modernity, in that “everything changes faster than could be expected thus far or than had been experienced previously.”351 “Due to the shorter spans of time,” he explains, “an element of unfamiliarity enters the daily lives of those affected, an element that cannot be derived from any previous experience: this characterizes the experience of acceleration.”352 It is this experience of acceleration in the modern age that creates a gap between what Koselleck has termed the “Erfahrungsraum”
and the “Erwartungshorizont,” between the “space of experience” and the “horizon of expectation” in modern times.353
However, while the acceleration of time has become a key characteristic for the understanding of time, there are also other concepts of time, as Aleida Assmann points out. Arguing for the co-presence of different cultural representations and interpretations of time, she writes:
350 cf. Hermann Lübbe, Im Zug der Zeit: Verkürzter Aufenthalt in der Gegenwart (Berlin;
Heidelberg: Springer, 1992).
351 Reinhart Koselleck, "Gibt es eine Beschleunigung der Geschichte?," Zeitschichten. Studien zur Historik. Mit einem Beitrag von Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Reinhart Koselleck (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000): 164. My translation. In the original: “Modern dagegen ist jene
Veränderung, die eine neue Zeiterfahrung hervorruft: daß sich nämlich alles schneller ändert, als man bisher erwarten konnte oder früher erfahren hatte.“
352 Koselleck, "Gibt es eine Beschleunigung der Geschichte?": 164. My translation. In the original: ”Es kommt durch die kürzeren Zeitspannen eine Unbekanntheitskomponente in den Alltag der Betroffenen, die aus keiner bisherigen Erfahrung ableitbar ist: das zeichnet die Erfahrung der Beschleunigung aus.”
353 Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989): 349-375.
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While the modern time regime […] has fully implemented the linear characteristic of time and has linked it to a cultural orientation that privileges innovation, rupture, acceleration and, to a certain extent, forgetting, there are also other time regimes that do the opposite.354
In support of this argument, the cultural performance of time and memory in 20th-century African-American theater by female playwrights can be seen as one example of such time regimes that “do not emphasize and support the rupture between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation, but rather bridge the space of experience and the horizon of expectation.”355
The present study has shown that in contrast to the understanding of time as a break with the past and a continual new beginning in the present, 20th-century African-American theater by female playwrights enacts a continuum of time in which the past informs both the present and the future. The plays articulate a particular socially, culturally, and historically shaped experience and interpretation of time as a ‘remembered time’ that is defined in and through memory in that it draws on a conscious remembering and re-interpreting of a collective knowledge about the past on the part of the characters. This culturalization of time is interpreted as cultural performance in support of a particular African-American identity, which is enacted and embodied on stage.
Interestingly enough, in all but two of the plays considered here the characters are never explicitly introduced as specifically ‘black’ or ‘African-American’ characters. Even in Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), arguably the most popular and most successful play by an African-American female playwright, the dramatic text does not explicitly mention the cultural background of the Younger family members, although Hansberry repeatedly stressed that A Raisin in the Sun is “a Negro play before it is anything else,”
354 Aleida Assmann, "Kulturelle Zeitgestalten," Time and History. Zeit und Geschichte, eds.
Friedrich Stadler and Michael Stöltzner (Frankfurt: Ontos-Verlag, 2006): 481. My translation. In the original: “Während das moderne Zeitregime […] den linearen Charakter der Zeit konsequent durchgesetzt und mit einer kulturellen Orientierung verbunden hat, die Innovation, Bruch, Beschleunigung und auf eine bestimmte Weise das Vergessen privilegiert, gibt es andere Zeitregimes, die das Gegenteil tun.”
355 Assmann, "Kulturelle Zeitgestalten": 481. My translation. In the original: “Sie betonen und fördern nicht den Bruch zwischen Erfahrungsraum und Erwartungshorizont, sondern schlagen umgekehrt eine Brücke zwischen Erfahrungsraum und Erwartungshorizont.” For further
information on cultural structures and encodings of time see Aleida Assmann, Ist die Zeit aus den Fugen? Aufstieg und Fall des Zeitregimes der Moderne (München: Hanser, 2013).
portraying “a Negro family, specifically and culturally.”356 Except for Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel (1916) whose original publication explicitly introduces the characters as
“colored”357 and except for Zora Neale Hurston’s Color Struck (1925) in which the main characters are described as “light brown-skinned,” “black,” and “mulatto” (CS 89), the dramatic texts only mention the characters’ ethnic backgrounds in the context of individual white characters portrayed on stage. In A Raisin in the Sun, for example, Mr.
Lindner, the representative of the all-white neighborhood that the Younger family moves to, is introduced as “a quiet-looking middle-aged white man in a business suit” (RIS 541).
Similarly, Selma Frazier in Myrtle Smith Livingston’s For Unborn Children is described as “a young white girl” (FUC 185), while the main characters Leroy, Marion, and Grandma Carlson are simply introduced as “a young lawyer,” “his sister,” and “his grandmother” (FUC 185).
The analysis of time and memory in the plays has however revealed that the characters are not universal types, but rather represent unique members of a distinct African-American we-group, in that they are identified and identify themselves with a particular, culturally-specific knowledge of the past that is passed on from one family generation to the next. For the characters, the acceptance of the past’s legacy, awareness about the significance of ancestry, and the integration into a larger genealogical chain are shaping forces in the process of cultural self-creation and self-affirmation, helping them to cope with the challenge of being black in a white-dominated society.
By introducing several generations of characters simultaneously on stage, all of the plays considered here emphasize the aspect of genealogy and, thus, the temporal continuity ensured by the female characters in the plays. In their social roles as mothers, grandmothers, and othermothers the female characters act as preservers of culture and guardians of collective memory. They are responsible for ensuring and stabilizing the link between the past, the present, and the future by transmitting the collective knowledge of the past to their children and grandchildren. With the goal of helping the younger generations to learn from the past and from the experiences of their ancestors in order to
356 Lorraine Hansberry, "Make New Sounds: Studs Terkel Interviews Lorraine Hansberry,"
American Theatre 1.2 (November 1984): 5.
357 Angelina Weld Grimké and Carolivia Herron, Selected Works of Angelina Weld Grimké, The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
11. Conclusion: Re-Thinking the African-AmericanLiterary Canon 196
ensure continuity in the future, the living female elders act as teachers and initiate a process of learning and maturing in the younger family members by deliberately fostering a collective remembering of the past in the present moment on stage.
The social and cultural meaning of the past is thereby not related to where the moment recalled is situated on a linear scale of time, but rather to how it is remembered and what social significance it gains in the process of memorization. The representation and embodiment of the characters’ African-American identity on stage is grounded in a conscious re-working and a reconstructive encoding of the collective past by the characters. In “memory talk” and in the practice of “conversational remembering”358 on stage the collective knowledge about a remote past preserved in cultural memory and the shared memories of a more recent past transported in communicative memory intermingle, turning the past into a source of pride and empowerment for the characters.
By reassessing the collective trauma of slavery, by re-establishing the link to Mother Africa as a homeland, by commemorating specific African-American freedom fighters and cultural figures, and by re-interpreting family histories as stories of survival and success, the different family members mobilize shared ties to different moments in the past, thereby identifying themselves as members of a specific African-American we-group based on the deliberate identification with a specific collective memory.
On a metalevel, this enactment of African-American history on stage is a staging of difference that serves as a means of cultural self-definition and self-affirmation. Serving to constitute and confirm the particularity and singularity of African-American identity, the plays present a cultural performance of African-American time as a remembered time based on a deliberate re-working and encoding of the past, thereby informing the creation of a counter-history and a counter-memory to white American history in the public sphere of the theater. For any society, the particular shared knowledge transported and preserved in collective memory represents focal points of identification in that it serves to differentiate between a ‘we’ and a ‘they.’ Based on the conviction that the family introduced in each of the plays can be conceived as a trope for the community as a whole, theater thus represents an important vehicle for the definition and formation of African-American identity in general. By articulating and enacting specific moments in black
358 Harald Welzer, Das kommunikative Gedächtnis: Eine Theorie der Erinnerung (München:
Beck, 2008): 16.
American history on stage, African-American theater by female playwrights functions as a medium of collective memory and a carrier thereof, pointing to the cultural significance of this specific dramatic body of work. Due to the fact that all memories have a unique place in international and/or national history, the representation of a particular American collective memory on stage also encourages a re-assessment of African-American history in general. By introducing integral elements of African-African-American cultural memory on stage and by creating a Theater of the Present that draws on particular contemporary social and political events and discourses, the plays enact and confirm a very specific cultural and historical background. As an artistic mediation of history and memory, the re-assessment of the past on stage thus functions as a re-appropriation of time in general.
In general, across its various parts, the present study has aimed to understand how the cultural performance of time and memory in the plays informs the representation and construction of African-American identity on stage. Due to the fact that theater represents a constitutive carrier of collective memory, the cultural performance and embodiment of time and memory on stage provides a most valuable opportunity for analyzing and identifying processes and mechanisms of cultural identity formation, transformation, and affirmation. At the intersection of literary, cultural, and memory studies, and including both canonical and non-canonical plays and playwrights from different moments in the 20th century, the present study has given an insight into the as yet largely undiscovered cultural significance of African-American theater by female playwrights for the understanding of African-American identity construction in and through culturally specific notions, experiences, and encodings of time.
The inclusion of plays by black female playwrights in anthologies such as The Fire This Time: African-American Plays for the 21st Century (2004)359 as well as events such as the 2009 and 2011 Ensemble Studio Theatre festivals “The River Crosses Rivers: Short Plays by Women of Color,”360 which presented plays by Lynn Nottage, Kia Corthron, Cori Thomas, France-Luce Benson, and other contemporary African-American women
359 Harry J. Elam and Robert Alexander, The Fire This Time : African-American Plays for the 21st Century (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2004). The collection includes plays by black women playwrights Suzan-Lori Parks, Oni Faidi Lampley, Lynn Nottage, and Kamilah Forbes.
360 For a review of the 2009 festival see Rachel Saltz, "In Plays by Women, a Tug of War between Parent and Child," The New York Times September 24, 2009.
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playwrights, attest to the continuing richness and vitality of this specific tradition of dramatic art and further emphasize the necessity of re-discovering and re-assessing this body of work in future research on African-American literature and culture.