-
Title
-
The Motherhood Aesthetic in Contemporary African American Women’s Drama
-
Read Online
-
Abstract
-
Contemporary Black female playwrights are engaged in response writing in which their characters reply to that which they experience as Black women in modern America. The five plays presented in this collection of essays chart a contemporary Black female motherhood aesthetic that identifies, protects, and reveals the nuances of Black motherhood, specifically. This aesthetic places the full humanity of Black women on display to expose their varying levels of self-determination, trauma, bravery, self-preservation, and jubilation.
As part of the new Black female playwrights’ dramatic aesthetic, issues of skin color, marginalization, coming-of-age, suicide, sexual identity, social pressures and perceptions, and family dislocation resurface and take new forms in Suzan-Lori Parks’ In the Blood, Cheryl West’s Before It Hits Home, Aisha Rahman’s The Mojo and the Sayso, Dael Orlandersmith’s Monster, and Velina Hasu Houston’s Alabama Rain. Buried deep in the (con)text of these contemporary plays, this emergent aesthetic counters presentations of the happy, upwardly mobile Black family drawn frequently in past-era plays and affirms that there is not one homogenized Black family but instead multiple representations of motherhood–some pleasant and some unpleasant–and all of them real.
-
Keywords
-
Literary Studies, African American Studies, Women Studies, Cultural Studies
-
Author
-
La Tanya L. Rogers, Ph.D. and Tanya E. Walker, Ph.D.
-
Bio
-
La Tanya L. Reese is Director of the W.E.B. DuBois Honors Program and Associate Professor of Literature & Drama in the Department of English at Fisk University. Tanya E. Walker is Chair and Associate Professor of African American Literature in the Department of English at Winston-Salem State University.
-
Platform
-
PressBooks
-
Bibliographic Citation
-
Rogers, La Tanya L. and Tanya E. Walker. "The Motherhood Aesthetic in Contemporary African American Women’s Drama." Illinois Open Publishing Network, 2025. https://doi.org/10.21900/pww.29
-
Review
-
"…The Motherhood Aesthetic in Contemporary Black American Plays challenges and expands existing denotations and representations of Black Motherhood, as it provides an interdisciplinary aesthetic/theoretical framework through which to realistically re-present and, with cultural empathy, interpret the complexities of Black Motherhood, Black mother’s love, and Black women’s maternal herstories….This work compels the reader to reconsider their own perceptions and misperceptions of motherhood.”
Ladrica C. Menson-Furr, University of Memphis
-
Read the Full Review
