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Article: Sambo subjects: "declining the stereotype" in Suzan-Lori Parks's The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World.(Critical Essay)
- Article from:
- Studies in the Humanities
- Article date:
- June 1, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Department of English. 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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The focal presence of stereotyped characters in Suzan-Lori Parks's second play (1) The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World causes discomfiture as well as a sense of alienation in its readers/spectators. And this is not a surprising response. The grotesquerie of stereotype can be both debilitating and destructive, creating, as Frantz Fanon argues, an individual who is an "object in the midst of other objects[,] sealed into that crushing objecthood" where "consciousness of the body" could be nothing else but "an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage" (Black Skin 109, 110-112). Fanon concludes that the resulting psychological damage of stereotyping leaves ...