The book examines how early twentieth century Black theatre artists depicted national mythologies of the United States.
White-authored pageants and plays written for the 1932 Bicentennial celebration of George Washingtons birthday relegated Black Americans to the periphery through racist stereotyping. Black activists Mary Church Terrell and W. E. B. Du Bois seized the opportunity to place Black people at center stage and to revise contemporary views of Washington and of Black achievement. Terrells The Pageant-Play of Phyllis Wheatley and Du Boiss George Washington and Black Folk dramatize how the achievements of Black men and women fit into the US origin story. The book combines OMalleys edited versions of these two scripts with a scholarly monograph contextualizing them within the larger Bicentennial event. This edition will be the first time that Terrells pageant, a biography of the life of the enslaved African poet Phillis Wheatley, has ever been published. Du Boiss pageant is a transgressive revision of the Washington myth.
This interdisciplinary book will be a valuable resource for college and university courses in American theatre and performance studies, Black Studies, and Womens Studies, as it includes the scripts themselves, the book is particularly useful in theatre or literature classes in these subject areas.
