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Article: Racial Violence and Representation: Performance Strategies in Lynching Dramas of the 1920s.
- Article from:
- African American Review
- Article date:
- December 22, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 African American Review. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Plays representing the history of lynching in the United States are only beginning to be understood as a distinctly American theatrical genre, a type of drama that began to appear at least as early as 1905 and continues to evolve on the contemporary stage. As the first anthology to address how the horrors of lynching have been represented in American theatre, Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women, which Kathy A. Perkins and I edited in 1998, reveals the genre's historical continuity and speaks to its prior neglect in the areas of theatre history and dramatic criticism. Except for my studies and those by Perkins and Winona Fletcher, lynching drama, as a body of ...