Fragmented Racial Identity in Funnyhouse of a Negro

Enes Eren

Abstract


Adrienne Kennedy, as one of the distinguished playwrights, has composed many plays in her writing career; has addressed the issues related to black women’s lives in the US reflecting the intersecting factors that oppress African American women. In her plays, she has pictured how African American female characters are doubly oppressed compared to other groups of women and has illuminated the difference between experiences of black and white women. In this essay, I will be looking at Funnyhouse of a Negro, which tells the story of alienated African American female who ends up in committing suicide due to the oppression of society. I aim to shed light on how African American women are more oppressed than other minority groups via the character Sarah in the play who oscillates between polarities as the outcome of identity crisis owing to her race. As well, I will explore the ways Sarah’s oppression caused by intersecting dynamics such as race, gender, class, and sexuality, therefore, her traumatic identity crisis needs to be analyzed considering these categories interdependently rather than separately. These categories are shaped through a white ideology that dominates and makes African American women internalize racial hatred toward their own race. Overall, I will examine how Kennedy deconstructs the institutionalized racism by using historical characters and distorted white images to subvert the misrepresentation of African American women on the stage and emphasizes the historical burden on them created by white ideology.

Keywords


Adrienne Kennedy; black feminism; identity; gender

Full Text:

PDF

References


Allen, Carol, Peculiar Passages: Black Women Playwrights, 1875 to 2000 (2005). Peter Lang.

Barbee, Evelyn L., and Marilyn Little (2006). Health, Social Class and African-American Women (Estelle Disch, Ed.). Reconstructing Gender. A Multicultural Anthology, McGraw Hill.

Barnett, Claudia (1996). This Fundamental Challenge to Identity: Reproduction and Representation in the Drama of Adrienne Kennedy. Theatre Journal, 48(2), 141-155 https://www.jstor.org>

Bhabha, Homi (1994). Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse. The Location of Culture, 85-92 Routledge.

Bryant-Jackson, Paul K. and Lois More Overbeck (Eds.). (1992) Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy. U of Minnesota Press.

Brown, Lorraine A. (1975). For the Characters are Myself: Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro. Negro American Literature Forum 9(3), 86-88.

Burns, E. (1972). Theatricality: A study of the convention in the theatre and in social life. Longman.

Bustin, Edouard (2002). Remembrance of Sins past: Unraveling the Murder of Patrice Lumumba’, Review of African Political Economy, 29(93), 537-560.

Cannon, Katie (1995). Katie’s Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community. Continuum.

Collins, Patricia Hill (1998). Fighting words: Black Women & The Search For Justice. University of Minnesota Press.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1995). Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. New.

Curb, Rosemary K. (1980). Fragmented Selves in Adrienne Kennedy’s

Funnyhouse of a Negro and The Owl Answers’. Theatre Journal, 32(2), 180-195.

Diamond, Elin (1993). Rethinking Identification: Kennedy, Freud, Brecht. The Kenyon Review 15(2), 86-99.

DuBois, W.E.B. (1903). The Souls of Black Folk. A.C. McClurg.

Finley, Taryn (2015). Jesus Wasn’t White and Here’s Why That Matters. The Huffington Post.

Forte, Jeanie. Kennedy's Body Politic: The Mulatta, Menses, and the Medusa. In Bryant-Jackson and Overbeck (Eds.) 157-169.

Ha, Quan Manh and Conor Hogan (2018). The Violence of Duality in Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro. Anglican, 27(1), 121-134.

Jill, Karson (2005). The Civil Rights Movement. Thomson Gate.

Kennedy, Adrienne (1997). Funnyhouse of a Negro. Samuel French.

Kolin, Philip C. (2005). Understanding Adrienne Kennedy. U of South Carolina P., 1-21.

Koppen, Randi (1998). Psychoanalytic Enactments: Adrienne Kennedy’s Staging of Memory. HJEAS 4(1), 121-34.

Meigs, Susan Elizabeth (1998). No Place but the Funnyhouse: The Struggle for Identity in Three Adrienne Kennedy Plays [Doctoral dissertation, the University of Texas at Austin].

Millett, K. (1969). Sexual Politics. University of Illinois Press.

Nzongola-Ntalaja, Georges (January 2011). Patrice Lumumba: The Most Important Assassination of the 20th Century. The Guardian.

Smith, Barbara (1979). Toward a Black Feminist Criticism. Women's Studies International Quarterly 2(2), 183-194.

Walker, Alice (1983). In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. Harcourt Brace & Company.



View Counter


Abstract - 892
PDF - 551

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2020 Enes Eren

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

                                                       SUPPORT JOURNAL

ISSN: 2454-2296

E-ISSN: 2395-0897