Review by Ladrica C. Menson-Furr
Project Authored by LaTanya L. Reese Rogers and Tanya Walker
Ladrica Menson-Furr is assistant dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and associate professor of African American literature at the University of Memphis. She is the author of August Wilson’s Fences, August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and articles on Wilson’s and Pearl Cleage’s dramatic works. Her current research projects include a regional study of August Wilson’s and Katori Hall’s dramatic canons. She has been a member of the Department of English for 24 years, has served as coordinator of the African American literature concentration, and as director of the African and African American Studies program. Also, Menson-Furr held appointments as a Provost’s Fellow and Faculty Fellow for the Office of the Vice President of Student Academic. Dr. Menson-Furr earned the B.A. in English from Spelman College and both the M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature from Louisiana State University.
The Motherhood Aesthetic in Contemporary Black American Plays is a testimonial to the diverse ways that Black mothers love, nurture, and protect their children and themselves within a myriad of realities that force them to conform and contort in order to, as W.E.B. Du Bois explains in the Souls of Black Folk (1903), “keep themselves from being torn asunder.” Each essay examines the unique and shared ways that each play-text, dramatist, and motherly character/voice exemplifies the compelling “Black Motherhood Aesthetic” LaTanya L. Reese Rogers and Tanya Walker have birthed into existence. This “Black Motherhood Aesthetic” identifies a “new mother figure,” who:
is, given her circumstances, non-nurturing and non-caretaking. She makes her own choices—sometimes bad ones and sometimes good ones—that render her oppressed, in many cases, by her own hand. . . Thus, left to negotiate a space for herself beyond re-representations of the virtuous woman or the fallen woman, “she,” the Black mother figure, becomes a text through which Black female playwrights lay bare the deep problems twenty-first-century mothers face: multiple unplanned pregnancies, injury to their children by violent hands—sometimes their own—the influx of infectious diseases in their families, poverty, abandonment by male family members, and prostitution and drug dealing as means to make money or assert power. (Reese Rogers and Walker, Chapter 3)
Thus, The Motherhood Aesthetic in Contemporary Black American Plays challenges and expands existing denotations and representations of Black Motherhood, as it provides an interdisciplinary aesthetic/theoretical framework through which to realistically re-present and, with cultural empathy, interpret the complexities of Black Motherhood, Black mother’s love, and Black women’s maternal herstories.
This collection centers upon themes of, “literary naturalism and dramatic realism, skin color, marginalization, coming-of-age, suicide, sexual identify, and social pressures and perceptions,” as each discussion privileges the mother/other mother characters and creates a polyphony of testimonials that crosses decades, geographies, and socio-economic classes. Through close analyses and contemporary interpretations of Suzan-Lori Parks’ In the Blood, Before It Hits Home by Cheryl West, Aisha Rahman’s The Mojo and the Sayso, Monster by Dael Orlandersmith, and Alabama Rain by Velina Hasu Houston, Rogers and Walker create a theoretical choreo-poem that pays homage to the structure of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuff.
The Motherhood Aesthetic in Contemporary Black American Plays privileges the realistic perspectives present within Black motherhood culture as it revisits and revises Black Women’s dramatic canons by interacting with existing Black Women’s dramatic anthologies and reintroducing dramatists and plays that demand study and staging. Each essay is its own dramaturgical voice, providing new ways of reading the works themselves and Black Women as mothers and individuals. Each presents counter-narratives to historical and contemporary directives and beliefs concerning Black motherhood and mainstream, “Western” motherhood. This work compels the reader to reconsider their own perceptions and misperceptions of motherhood. It also obliges readers to ponder the reality that mothers are human and that motherhood is often more unique and specific than one may think.
The project’s digital platform, like the gift of the theatre, creates an interactive and accessible experience that provides the reading audience with a “scholarly stage,” a digital “talkback experience,” and, as the authors note, a preview read for theater audiences. It is the embodiment of the Digital Humanities, particularly as it creates a constructive collaboration between performance theory, dramatic theory and history, cultural history, and the importance of Black Feminist and Black Womanist theories, methodologies, and aesthetics in every discipline, especially theater. Each essay’s “stage” includes a setting that foregrounds the playwright through photographs and artwork reflecting the centrality of Black Womanhood and Motherhood as both subject and image. Moreover, embedded into each essay are hyperlinks to articles, essays, YouTube links and published artifacts that serve as both prompts for further study of the dramatists and the works’ themes and subjects. Yet more importantly, these hyperlinks serve as FACTS that establish the depth, breadth, and diversity of Black and Africana women and their kin. These facts, or live links that can be updated and expanded at any time, make this digital text and its discussion a herstory that can be explored in “real time” and accessed by all. Students, instructors, dramaturgs, and theatre patrons can engage with these works with a touch of a finger and quickly break the “third wall” that separates knowledge and dramatic entertainment.