Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Plays.

Baum, Robert Craig

Harry J. Elam, Jr., and Robert Alexander, eds. New York: Plume, 1996. 651 pp. $16.95.

Colored Contradictions represents a significant editorial event for the field of African-American drama. This highly anticipated and critically necessary compilation of African-American voices performing on contemporary American stages provides general and scholarly readers with an exceptional editorial narrative of late eighties, early nineties artistic and historical revisionism. Harry J. Elam, Jr., and Robert Alexander have undoubtedly published dramatic texts that agree with Alexander's prefatory excitement and vision for a collection of "plays that bite, contradict, sample, inform, you know, plays that be kicking mad flava..." (17).

In Colored Contradictions Pomo Afro Homos' episodic performances of their particular African-American gay experience (Fierce Love) structure and comment on the social and familial tragedy of AIDS discussed in Wayne Corbitt's Crying Holy and Cheryl L. West's Before It Hits Home; the domestic struggles, womanist crises, and the search for what Paul Carter Harrison has termed an African-American ancestral imperative presented in Shay Youngblood's Shakin' the Mess Outta Misery, and the quest for justice and physical and economic freedom in Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women. The masculine pathologies and search for the divine within the self (for black boys who have considered homicide when the streets were too much, Keith Antar Mason) speak to the seach for voice and expression within a canonical work of literature, as Robert Alexander attempts in I Ain't Yo' Uncle: A New lack Revisionist Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Most impressively, these dramatic and imaginative discussions of AIDS, gender, family, class, and race inform all the plays collected, and describe our central familial and social problems (AIDS, violence, poverty, abortion) with precision and a much needed dose of cultural pragmatism. Elam and Alexander allow these problems to affect all private and public "worlds," to reconfigure (and in an amazing way, center) what have traditionally been treated in anthologies as marginalized, alternative "world views," histories, and human relationships. "My point is, we're all involved here," Rhodesia Jones's character Artist tells her audience in Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women. Jones's authorial and the Artist's narrative commentary situate the American prison system: the perverse number of women of color behind bars. And the struggle by these women to gain a political voice describes crises, resolutions, dislocations, and loving embraces within a continuum of intertextual spaces formed by the plays which describe the gay African-American experience. The Artist continues: "My point is, this ain't no time to be buying dogs and locking doors `cause you see `them' comin'. `Cause `they' could be `us' and you may wake up and find that you've locked yourself in and they're sitting at your breakfast table."

My earlier ad hoc use of the term editorial event was not meant as a cutesy porno flourish but an attempt to describe an interesting (and ultimately dubious) process of textual construction I associate with Colored Contradictions. Elam, a professor of drama at Stanford University, rightly describes a crisis in the state of African-American theater which inspired this collection: "Never before have black gay plays, black family dramas, and black historical dramas all been collected in one volume. Individually as well as collectively, these plays consciously foreground the interactions [among] race, class, gender, and sexuality." That is, the sheer absence of anthologies edited to include dramatic texts written within what could be called the "African-American postmodern" bothered both editors. To correct this problem Elam draws heavily on postmodern theory. He cites somewhat flippantly Cornel West and refutes unnecessarily Jean-Francois Lyotard. More specifically, Elam fails to acknowledge Lyotard's proclamation that "history is dead" as a necessary theoretic which helped to establish the critical transmutations of literary and cultural analysis from which Colored Contradictions draws and upon which the anthology builds its central claim: that embarking on a project of editorial text construction results in a public document (the anthology) which, in turn, validates the diversity of contemporary dramatic voices traditionally silenced from discussions of African-American drama. Here, Elam necessarily inserts himself as an historical interlocutor and engenders his collected works with the power of necessary historical revisionism. Theoretical deconstruction vis-a-vis a Nietzschean death of history, however, in Elam's view, acts to afford contemporary African-American playwrights "the opportunity to compose alternative histories, to control their own representations, and to expose and interrogate the misrepresentations of African-American culture and history proposed and imposed by the dominant culture."

Elam and Alexander, I suppose, are correct for situating their text within the African-American Postmodern, a space in our intellectual history which, as Fredric Jameson describes it in his book Postmodernism, "looks for breaks, for events rather than new worlds, for the telltale instant after which it is no longer the same ... or, better still, for shifts and irrevocable changes in the representation of things and the way they change." Yet despite this critical agreement, Elam writes minimally about the theories and concepts which would help ground his introductory comments within the poststructural intellectual tradition with which he desires association and would assist further the reader who may not be familiar with Elam's expansive (and unnammed) sources. After all Colored Contradictions, unlike any anthology of African-American drama published to date, will be read by a wider (and perhaps less critically trained) audience. Why bring the reader along for the ride only to leave him or her standing on the shoulder without a road map?

Elam and Alexander contribute to the collective shattering of monolithic concepts of contemporary African-American dramatic representation. Most importantly, they utilize dramatic narrative as a necessary substitution for deconstructing notions of "objective" historical proclamation (an objective hegemony they associate with a dominant white culture) and instead assign for African-American playwrights and performers the titles of historian, critic, and subject traditionally associated with non-African-American voices such as Bertold Brecht, William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Edward Albee, Henry David Hwang, Tony Kushner, and others.

You will notice my deliberate omission of African-American playwrights. I suppose you could say that I am following Elam's model, for not only does he fail to convey with precision and ease the intricate philosophical and historical arguments generally associated with postmodern literary and critical discourse--the ideological dislocations, narrative reconfigurations, linguistic and syntactical flourishes which empower and constitute emerging voices--but Elam also delinks his anthology (tacitly or somewhat deliberately) from the very history it attempts to rewrite, reacquire, and ultimately celebrate--namely, the painstakingly slow African-American external reconstitution (Black Arts especially) and internal calibration of the hegemonic American "system" of cultural production known more commonly as "theater" (the very playwrights included in his volume). In other words, his introduction would have better served the reader by describing with greater attention the earlier historical moments of African-American expression which challenged modernist dramatic notions of form, voice, and space. Adrienne Kennedy, Amiri Baraka, Douglas Turner Ward, Alice Childress, Larry Neal, James Baldwin--these dramatic precursors to the plays collected in Colored Contradictions, these (and many other) modernist and postmodernist African-American reconceptualizers of voice, character, place, and visual semiotics are never mentioned. Their inclusion in Elam's introduction would have established for the reader and performer links to a very immediate African-American past, as well as the broader, perhaps even more empowering, tradition of modernist and postmodernist dramatic expression. The capacity for the plays in this volume to examine in their very particular way the issues of homosexuality, the African-American family, AIDS, and the maternal imagination (Shakin' the Mess Outta Misery, especially) is indebted to the struggles and advancements African-American playwrights have been making in the American theater for three-quarters of a century.

For that matter, where are William Branch, Loften Mitchell, Langston Hughes, or the Lorraine Hansberry of What Use Are Flowers? A volume of contemporary African-American plays that never once mentions (even in contestation) the names August Wilson and Anna Devere Smith (Elam's Stanford colleague)? For Elam (and Alexander) to establish their need for this collection, I suggest they needed to establish early on the exact tradition they believe these plays refute, complicate, re-examine, and, as Alexander puts it, sample. In addition to these omissions, I find it curious that Elam never acknowledges some of the specific leading works in African and African-American dramatic criticism which have clearly influenced his selections and introductory commentary. At what point in African-American dramatic criticism did Classic Plays of the Negro Ensemble Company, Gus Edwards and Paul Carter Harrison's 1996 collaboration; Black Theater, USA: Forty-Five Plays by Black Americans, 1847-1974, by editor James V. Hatch and consultant Ted Shine; Paul Carter Harrison's Totem Voices (especially his seminal introductory essay "Mother Word"); and William B. Branch's Crosswinds: An Anthology of Black Dramatists in the Diaspora (and his "The Beginnings," which complements and complicates further Harrison's local and diasporic commentary)--at what point did these texts become obsolete? Why are these texts not acknowledged by Elam? postmodern understandings of "newness" and "emergence" suppress (in the act of narrative displacement) the very historical record (or historical narrative, if you will) many readers will need to appreciate deeply the exact, profoundly radical mission of Elam and Alexander's project.

Hearing the linguistic cacophonies and allowing the African-American cultural liminality of Suzan-Lori Parks's Imperceptible Mutabilities to establish an intertextual vortex through which Robert Alexander's I Ain't Yo' Uncle and Talvin Wilks's Tod, the Boy, Tod can dialogue with and celebrate what Paul Gilroy describes in his preface to The Black Atlantic as "the inescapable hybridity and intermixture of ideas."

Unfortunately, Elam misses a significant opportunity for Colored Contradictions to disseminate postmodern literary, dramatic, and cultural theory to a broader reading and performing audience. Plume may have limited Elam and Alexander's amount of space for the introduction. But, sacrificing critical integrity for the sampling of critical terminologies and discourses and the suppression of African-American dramatic history--whatever the commercial limitations--is inexcusable. In fact, given the enormous length of Colored Contradictions, an additional ten or fifteen pages would have allowed Elam the introductory space to satisfy both the historical and theoretical demands of his project without significantly increasing the cost or, for that matter, the length.

An immediate criticism of my review would demonstrate my inability to differentiate between academic and mainstream publications. However, considering that African-American drama has never been afforded such an opportunity for commercial distribution, Elam was given the opportunity (in volume size, in distribution) to set the standards for current and future work seeking to negotiate discussions occurring primarily in academic dramatic and literary journals and socially influential ideas whose dissemination relies on knowledgeable and influential critics like Elam and exceptionally talented playwrights like Alexander to bring mad flava to the people. As Shay Youngblood states through the character Miss Rosa in Shakin' the Mess Outta Misery, "Pay good attention to the road you travel."