1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910483442503321

Autore

Burrell Julie

Titolo

The Civil Rights Theatre movement in New York, 1939-1966 : staging freedom / / Julie Burrell

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, New York : , : Springer Berlin Heidelberg, , [2019]

�2019

ISBN

3-030-12188-7

Edizione

[1st ed. 2019.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (xv, 236 pages)

Collana

Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History

Disciplina

792.08996073

Soggetti

Theater - New York (State) - New York

African American theater

African Americans - Civil rights

Civil rights movements - United States

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Chapter 1: Introduction -- Chapter 2: The Negro People's Theatre and the Emergence of the Civil Rights Theatre Movement -- Chapter 3: "An American Dilemma": Dramas of the Returning Negro Soldier -- Chapter 4: Rescripting the Negro Problem: The Cold War-Civil Rights Play -- Chapter 5: "To Be a Man": Progressive Masculinities in Lorraine Hansberry's Cold War-Civil Rights Plays -- Chapter 6: Alice Childress's Wedding Band and the Black Feminist Nation -- Epilogue.

Sommario/riassunto

This book argues that African American theatre in the twentieth century represented a cultural front of the civil rights movement. Highlighting the frequently ignored decades of the 1940s and 1950s, Burrell documents a radical cohort of theatre artists who became critical players in the fight for civil rights both onstage and offstage, between the Popular Front and the Black Arts Movement periods. The Civil Rights Theatre Movementrecovers knowledge of little-known groups like the Negro Playwrights Company and reconsiders Broadway hits including Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, showing how theatre artists staged radically innovative performances that protested Jim Crow and U.S. imperialism amidst a repressive Cold War atmosphere. By conceiving of class and gender as intertwining aspects



of racism, this book reveals how civil rights theatre artists challenged audiences to reimagine the fundamental character of American democracy.