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Article: Mule Bone: Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Dream Deferred of an African-American Theatre of the Black Word.(Critical Essay)
- Article from:
- African American Review
- Article date:
- March 22, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 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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There ought to be a Negro play written by a Negro that no white could ever have conceived or executed. (Eugene O'Neill, 1925)
Michael G. Cooke, in his study of Afro-American literature in the twentieth century, notes that, whereas modernism in Anglo-American literature adapted the form of an artificial detachment from the human, in Afro-American literature "it took the form of a centering upon the possibilities of the human and an emergent sense of intimacy predicated on the human." Consequently, black literature undertook "to reincarnate and reinvest with value the culture's lost sense of being and belonging" (5). This grappling with a sense of intimacy involved ...