Playing with Anger: Lessons from Contemporary Black Feminist Dramas

Within a society that often directs its anger toward Black bodies while dismissing the anger of those connected to them, the plays of 21st-century Black women serve as windows into the enduring cultural imprints of injustice enacted against Black people—both globally and, in particular, within the United States. Although scholarship has examined representations of Black anger more broadly, theatre as a site of Black feminist affective expression remains underexplored. This dissertation engages this line of inquiry through a Black feminist affective framework to theorize the manifestations and functions of anger in three contemporary plays: Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview (2018), Dominique Morisseau’s Confederates (2022), and Aleshea Harris’s What to Send Up When It Goes Down (2019). Through close reading, I analyzed how these plays represent and articulate Black women and girls’ angers and speak back to an anti-BlackAnger culture that subjugates and dehumanizes Black people by disqualifying their rights to anger and the knowledge produced by their feelings and expressions. Through this analysis, I identify three central themes: anger as (re)membrance, which affirms Black anger in bereavement and in the face of generational dispossession; mangled kinship, which expresses anger at the limits of affinity and the fractures of false kinship; and anger at the white gaze, which exposes the psychic and embodied effects of living under its constant surveillance. I also trace the literary and performative strategies through which these plays communicate anger. Ultimately, I argue that anger operates as a dramaturgical orientation and an affective pedagogy—one that reframes emotion, reshapes spectatorship, and generates new narratives about Black women and girls.

Author dc:creator

• Candice N. Mason (23292172)

• Theater
• Education, Curriculum and Instruction
• Women's Studies
• feminis
• Black Studies
• Gender Studies

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright
• Open Access after 2028-01-01

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.25417/uic.31451938.v1

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:figshare.com:article/31451938