Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal
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A01=Kate Dossett
African Americans and Communism
American Negro Theatre
anticommunism
Author_Kate Dossett
black archives
black heroes
black intellectual history
black knowledge production
black Living Newspapers
black performance
black performance communities
Black theatre
black theatre in Chicago
black theatre manuscripts
Category=ATD
Category=JBSL
Category=NHK
Communist Party of the USA
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
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eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Federal Theatre Project
Garveyism
Harlem theatre
Native Son
Negro Units
New Deal culture
Paul Green
Popular Front
radical black theatre
Richard Wright
Rose McClendon
Seattle Repertory Theatre
Shirley Graham Du Bois
social realism
Theodore Browne
Theodore Ward
Universal Negro Improvement Association
WPA
Product details
- ISBN 9781469654423
- Weight: 548g
- Dimensions: 155 x 233mm
- Publication Date: 24 Feb 2020
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Between 1935 and 1939, the United States government paid out-of-work artists to write, act, and stage theatre as part of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), a New Deal job relief program. In segregated "Negro Units" set up under the FTP, African American artists took on theatre work usually reserved for whites, staged black versions of "white" classics, and developed radical new dramas. In this fresh history of the FTP Negro Units, Kate Dossett examines what she calls the black performance community-a broad network of actors, dramatists, audiences, critics, and community activists-who made and remade black theatre manuscripts for the Negro Units and other theatre companies from New York to Seattle.
Tracing how African American playwrights and troupes developed these manuscripts and how they were then contested, revised, and reinterpreted, Dossett argues that these texts constitute an archive of black agency, and understanding their history allows us to consider black dramas on their own terms. The cultural and intellectual labor of black theatre artists was at the heart of radical politics in 1930s America, and their work became an important battleground in a turbulent decade.
Tracing how African American playwrights and troupes developed these manuscripts and how they were then contested, revised, and reinterpreted, Dossett argues that these texts constitute an archive of black agency, and understanding their history allows us to consider black dramas on their own terms. The cultural and intellectual labor of black theatre artists was at the heart of radical politics in 1930s America, and their work became an important battleground in a turbulent decade.
Kate Dossett is associate professor of history at the University of Leeds and the author of Bridging Race Divides: Black Nationalism, Feminism and Integration in the United States 1896–1935.
