Race Writes Representation

Assessment: practical essay [50%], project analysis [50%]

Progress has been made by scholars in recognizing how skewed the canons and how odd the histories that pertained to traditional disciplinary study of dramatic texts were in terms of race. Much work has developed out of those first efforts to find ‘minority’ writers and forgotten plays towards theories about the causes of the very classification ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ in culture: histories of empire, of slavery and of class struggle. As with all discoveries that realign our worn paradigms, currently the danger is that the new theoretical language too neatly divides the more complicated crossings of identity, identification, race, writing and reception. This module will examine how race, nation and gender mark a dramatic writer, the performance texts she or he writes, and the reception of that work by the audience. What we hope to break down is the assumptions at work in what we expect or are led to expect as readers and audience.