Collusions of Fact and Fiction: Performing Slavery in the Works of Suzan-Lori Parks and Kara Walker

Ilka Saal

ISBN 10: 1609387783 / ISBN 13: 9781609387785

Published by University of Iowa Press, 2021

About this Item

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Seller Inventory # B9781609387785

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Collusions of Fact and Fiction: Performing Slavery in the Works of Suzan-Lori Parks and Kara Walker
• Publisher: University of Iowa Press
• Publication Date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1609387783
• ISBN 13: 9781609387785
• Binding: Paperback / softback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 505 grams

About this title

Synopsis

Collusions of Fact and Fiction traces a generational shift in late twentieth-century African American cultural engagements with the history and legacies of transatlantic slavery. With a focus on works by playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and visual artist Kara Walker, the book explores how, in comparison to the first wave of neo-slave narratives of the 1970s and 1980s, artists of the 1990s and early 2000s tend to approach the past from the vantage point of a liberal entanglement of fact and fiction as well as a highly playful, often humorous, and sometimes irreverent signifying on entrenched motifs, iconographies, and historiographies.

Saal argues that the attempt to reconstruct or recuperate the experience of African Americans under slavery is no longer at stake in the works of artists growing up in the post–Civil Rights era. Instead, they lay bare the discursive dimension of our contemporary understanding of the past and address the continued impact of its various verbal and visual signs upon contemporary identities. In this manner, Parks and Walker stake out new possibilities for engaging the past and inhabiting the present and future.
 

About the Author

Ilka Saal is professor of American literature at the University of Erfurt. She is the author of New Deal Theater: The Vernacular Tradition in American Political Theater. She lives in Leipzig, Germany.