Harry J Elam.

Harry J Elam, Jr and Robert Alexander, ed modern York: Plume, 1996. 651 pp $1695

Colored Contradictions shows a significant editorial event for the field of African-American drama. This highly anticipated and critically necessary compilation of African-American voices performing forward contemporary American stages provides general and scholarly readers with an exceptional editorial narrative of late eighties, early nineties artistic and historical revisionism. Harry J Elam, Jr and Robert Alexander have undoubtedly published dramatic passages that agree with Alexander's prefatory excitement and vision for a collection of "plays that bite, contradict, sample, inform, you know, plays that be kicking mad flava..." (17)

In Colored Contradictions Pomo Afro Homos' episodic performances of their particular African-American gay experience (Fierce Love) conformation and comment on the social and familial tragedy of AIDS discussed in Wayne Corbitt's Crying religious and Cheryl L. West's Before It Hits Home; the domestic make an efforts womanist crises, and the search for what Paul Carter Harrison has confineed an African-American ancestral imperative at handed in Shay Youngblood's Shakin' the Mes Outta Misery, and the pursuit for justice and physical and economic freedom in Big mark Girls, Hard-Headed Women. The masculine pathologies and search for the divine within the self (for black striplings who have considered homicide when the public ways were too much, Keith Antar Mason) speak to the seach for voice and expression within a canonical work of literature, as Robert Alexander attempts in I Ain't Yo' Uncle: A recently made known lack Revisionist Uncle Tom's Cabin.

greatest in quantity impressively, these dramatic and imaginative discussions of AIDS, form relative to sex family, class, and race inform all the plays consider probableed and describe our central familial and social question at issues (AIDS, violence, poverty, abortion) with precision and a long needed dose of cultural pragmatism. Elam and Alexander allow these puzzles to affect all private and public "worlds," to reconfigure (and in an amazing way, center) what have traditionally been treated in anthologies as marginalized, alternative "world views," histories, and human relationships. "My point is, we're all involved here," Rhodesia Jones's character Artist mention one by ones her audience in Big stroke Girls, Hard-Headed Women. Jones's authorial and the Artist's narrative commentary situate the American prison system: the spiteful number of women of color behind bars. And the make an effort by these women to gain a political voice describes crises, resolutions, dislocations, and loving embraces within a continuum of intertextual spaces formed according to the plays which describe the gay African-American experience. The Artist continues: "My point is, this ain't no time to be buying dogs and locking doors `cause you papal court `them' comin'. `Cause `they' could be `us' and you may wake up and find that you've lock-uped yourself in and they're sitting at your breakfast table."

My earlier ad hoc use of the time editorial event was not meant as a cutesy porno flourish on the contrary an attempt to describe an interesting (and ultimately dubious) proces of textual construction I associate with Colored Contradictions. Elam, a professor of drama at Stanford University, rightly describes a crisis in the state of African-American theater which inspired this collection: "Never before have black gay plays, black family dramas, and black historical dramas all been scrape togethered in one volume. Individually as well as collectively, these plays consciously foreground the interactions [among] race, class, inflection for sex and sexuality." That is, the sheer absence of anthologies edited to include dramatic topics written within what could be called the "African-American postmodern" bothered the pair editors. To correct this question Elam draws heavily on postmodern theory. He cites somewhat flippantly Cornel West and confutes unnecessarily Jean-Francois Lyotard. More specifically, Elam fails to acknowledge Lyotard's proclamation that "history is dead" as a necessary theoretic which helped to establish the critical transmutations of literary and cultural analysis from which Colored Contradictions draws and with which the anthology builds its central claim: that embarking forward a project of editorial clause construction results in a public document (the anthology) which, in use validates the diversity of contemporary dramatic voices traditionally silenced from discussions of African-American drama. Here, Elam necessarily inserts himself as an historical interlocutor and begets his collected works with the power of necessary historical revisionism. Theoretical deconstruction vis-a-vis a Nietzschean death of history, however, in Elam's view, acts to afford contemporary African-American playwrights "the opportunity to adjust alternative histories, to control their acknowledge representations, and to expose and interrogate the misrepresentations of African-American agriculture and history proposed and imposed by means of the dominant culture."