Enacting Texts: African American Drama, Politics, and Presentation in the African American Literature Classroom

College Literature, Winter 2005 by Wood, Jacqueline

Teaching drama can be made particularly effective by emphasizing how, through performance, drama's accessibility to an audience can be politically potent. Relation of drama to audience remains a rich resource in terms of political expression. As a result, the genre, of all types of literature, is perhaps the most directly suited to addressing compelling public as well as private issues of life and has often been used as a device that publicly evokes issues of political change, particularly in the 20th century.1 In African American literature, this political connection with the audience is intensified by the radical nature of black drama as it expresses protest and at the same time embodies acts of communal resistance and reaffirmation for and with the audience.

My premise in teaching African American drama has been that it is a genre unavoidably tied to the mission of black resistance and revolution in response to the unique historical position of African Americans in the U.S. This relationship with resistance is enhanced by specialized characteristics of black drama that seek to emphasize, above all, the good of community and thus reflect the inherited African concept of Nommo. While Nommo is not the only disposition through which students may view black drama, the concept's value here is that it can be seen as a defined approach that encapsulates the more general interpretations of African American protest literature, an approach intended to ultimately illustrate to students what makes black drama black. Nommo, as an African-informed theoretical frame, can be applied to all forms of African American literature since it addresses the dynamics of black art in culture-specific ways. Nommo delineates in particular those qualities of African American literature that seem most grounded in both evident and hidden examples of the Africanisms that have survived as part of African American communal experience. Existence of these cultural connections to African culture is commonly accepted, and Nommo is one approach that effectively establishes through these connections a uniquely African American literary analysis. To engage students in studying the special qualities of African American drama, I work toward situating African American dramatic literature from within this theoretical framework of the concept of Nommo and from within African American historical experience. I then buttress these approaches with classroom activities that develop and reaffirm students' understanding of black drama through direct experiences uniquely available in working with texts written-to-be-performed. The influence of African American drama on black social reality as well as on specifically black literary tradition prompts such exploration in the African American literature classroom. If one can impart to students of African American literature and culture the distinguishing qualities of African American drama, this often understudied, if not ignored, segment of African American literature can be made relevant to students' overall appreciation of African American literary accomplishment. With this goal in mind, Part I of this article explores a suggested theoretical and textual framing of African American drama, and Part II demonstrates how this framing can be effectively conveyed to students through classroom experiences.

I

In theorizing the political and social sense of black drama, the African concept of Nommo is central. Nommo philosophy embraces interaction of audience and the Word and is grounded in the African view of rhetoric as "of community." According to Maulana Karenga, this notion originates in "ancient African culture" and evolves "as a rhetoric of communal deliberation, discourse, and action, directed toward bringing good into the community and the world" (2003, 5-6). Nommo ultimately works through implied group reaffirmation, operating primarily to create a release of the collective spirit through communal participation. Within this emphasis on community is a privileging of the Word as life force, essence, and creative energy aimed toward resisting any social forces that "deny or limit" respect for the "dignity and the rights of the human person, meaningful political participation, economic justice, and shared power" (7, 15). Thus, Nommo's force exists in the "sacred, indispensable, and creative nature of the Word" and is deployed into the world as fundamental to a self-representation which becomes socially and politically potent (8). And, although the principles of Nommo are seen by most American Afrocentric theorists as primarily centered in black ritualized texts intended to evoke the spiritual energies of a communal audience, I would argue that induced, culturally specific awareness or activism that comes out of communal interaction with radicalized African American dramatic texts can also be seen as comprising a kind of Nommo effect. According to Paul Carter Harrison in his The Drama of Nommo, authentic outcomes of "inspired" black drama result from works that exhibit an "aesthetic preoccupation with black life," are aimed toward "mass appeal," and reinforce the "attitudes and traits . . . that reflect our continuity with a lifestyle that has its origin in Africa" (1973, 195). Harrison continues that one of the most important aims of black drama is to insure that "the collected energies of black people coalesce to define their peculiarly humanistic place in a ravaged society" (196). Thus it seems that Nommo can be manifested not only in ritualized events but also in the signifying and politicized outcomes of radical black dramatic events, particularly as they embrace questions of social justice, unity in family and community, and cultural integrity.