Enacting difference: Marita Bonner's 'Purple Flower' and the ambiguities of race

African American Review, Fall, 1998 by Allison Berg, Merideth Taylor

Coming to terms with The Purple Flower's ambiguities through casting and staging decisions engaged students in what Michael Vanden Heuvel has recently described as the theatrical "enactment or production of knowledge" (164). Arguing that dramatic literature might serve to interrogate "the mythologized assumptions of reading that are traditionally taught in literature courses," Vanden Heuvel notes that, although drama is "written within an aesthetic and semiotic framework that includes theatricality or spectacle," these are the aspects most often suppressed when drama is taught as literature (161-62). Our own collaboration as professors of literature and of theater/dance, as well as the necessary collaboration of our students in interpreting and enacting the play, allowed us to consider the play both as text and as theater, making possible a self-conscious performance of textual meaning which, as Vanden Heuvel argues, can "transform knowledge in the act of producing it" (165).

While all dramatic literature might be said to produce knowledge in the act of performance, Bonner's play is unique among dramas of the Harlem Renaissance in the extent to which it demands a reader's (and performer's) active collaboration in meaning making. Not surprisingly, during our initial discussions of the play in class, our students varied widely in their interpretations. Yet students' understanding of the play did not polarize along race lines; rather, approximately equal proportions of black and white students initially felt that the play was solely about race or only partly about race. Students who espoused the latter view felt that America's history of racial discrimination left a legacy of economic disparities, but that race no longer determined an individual's power and privilege. They cited Michael Jackson as an example of a "raceless" success story. Other students argued that Jackson's ever-lightening skin, which they interpreted as evidence of internalized racism, demonstrated how important race still was; they cited Rodney King's experience as further evidence of the persistence of deeply rooted racial stereotypes. These students concluded that, given the persistence of racism, a "race war" was a conceivable, even inevitable, eventuality.

While this conversation began a useful dialogue about the ambiguous relationship between racial membership and social privilege, as well as between self- and social definitions of racial identity, it should be obvious from the examples cited above that initial discussions of these issues did not venture far from familiar mass-media images. Certainly, the dynamics of racial privilege and oppression were greatly simplified by students' reliance on mass-media images of racial "success" and "discrimination," which allowed students to talk about race in a sort of shorthand and created an illusion of consensus. Because they could easily assume shared outrage at Rodney King's beating, for example, students could avoid revealing the particularities or the complexities of their own experiences of race. It is also worth noting that the examples students chose to illustrate their ideas about race were, without exception, black; at this point, neither black nor white students indicated an awareness of whiteness as a racial identity.