The ANT's achievements and successes became historic in the black little theatre movement. Controversy and dissention among ANT members, problems arising from the commercial success of Anna Lucasta, high production costs, and "rumors of misappropriation of funds," led to the decline of the organization in the fifties. The ANT also pioneered in the broadcasting media, as it became the first black company to present a regular radio series. According to Abram Hill, the school became the first black theatre organization to be incorporated by the New York Board of Education. The ANT made significant contributions to the white commercial theatre as well as to the Harlem community. The ANT, founded by Abram Hill and Frederick O'Neal, sought to provide a place for black theatricians to perfect their craft, a place to train aspiring artists, and a place to entertain the Harlem residents. The Little Negro Theatre movement from the mid 1910s to late 1930s offered additional training opportunities in local community theatres, institutions of. In fact, the connection of dialect with cultural history (particularly a diasporic history) and how dialect as a linguistic concept preserves memory.This dissertation examines the American Negro Theatre (ANT) which for nine years (1940-49) provided a cultural experience for Harlem. Although black audiences and practitioners contested folk dialect in the mid- to late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, it continued to appear in race drama. The inclusion of dialect only exacerbated these concerns. As a result, interpretation and promotion of folk culture were especially vexed concerns for African Americans and the Little Negro Theatre. The Black Theatre Movement in the United States, 19601975, Ph.D. Check if you have access via personal or institutional login. Even so, conflict surrounded the role and responsibility of black drama in terms of whether theatre should employ art for propaganda or create art for its own sake. 5 - The Negro Little Theatre Movement pp 103-117. (2) Black theatre artists were continually aware that their racial representation and identification were simultaneously acts of social protest and artistic expression. This history is characterized by multiple attempts to redress what Stuart Hall calls the "politics of representation" as well as to identify how images of blackness were produced and how representations of race were conveyed. While her record of production is especially noteworthy within the context of the art theatre movement, where art was set against commercialism, it is more important in terms of African American theatre history. Her theatrical contributions as a dramatist, actress, and director have earned Spence a rightful place in literary and dramaturgical history. Her use of black dialect empowered Spence and her audience on two levels: she claimed both a racial and a feminist identity on the stage, and she created an intellectual and linguistic path for others to follow. The Negro little theatre movement / Jonathan Shandell African American women dramatists, 1930-1960 / Adrienne Macki Braconi Amiri Baraka and the Black arts. Hafers 1924 courtroom drama, ATTORNEY FOR THE DEFENSE, by an African-American theatre. Yet, at a time when black authors and artists were encouraged to think in terms of racial uplift, and when black dialect was becoming a subject for anthropological study-a relic of folkways-the use of black dialect onstage was at once a bold and a dangerous choice. A program for a Depression-era theatrical performance of Eugene G. "Talking black" enables Spence to dramatize self-actualized black women who fight against oppression and consumption while struggling to maintain racial and gender subjectivity. (1) Spence's inclusion of dialect functions not only as a representation of African American identity but also as an act of resistance. Moreover, by codifying the performance of black identity through the use of dialect, she underscored race consciousness.Īccording to linguist John Edwards, language serves as an instrument of communication and a system enabling communities to maintain their identity. However, by creating theatre for African American audiences through her work with the Little Negro Theatre movement in the 1920s, Spence provided an alternative to stereotypical black minstrelsy. To speak means to assume a culture.Īlthough Eulalie Spence was writing at the same time as other prominent black playwrights and authors, such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and James Weldon Johnson, her plays have often been overlooked by contemporary scholars, who tend to dismiss her work because of its inclusion of black dialect (with its echoes of minstrelsy) and because of her failure during her lifetime to sustain a career in theatre. Every dialect, every language, is a way of thinking.
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