Henry Louis Gates.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr in his The Signifying Monkey A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988) states that the black vernacular tradition stands as a metaphoric signpost at the "liminal crossroads of improvement contact and ensuing difference at which Africa and Afro-America meet" (4) However, the universal of liminality within Afro-diasporic experiences, and more specifically within the (African-)American connection is itself a slippery signifier. As a transitional or marginal state, the time also suggests fixedness, or a stopping point--a condition of stasis, or non-movement. This, in divert places in question the possibilities of one as well as the other voice (the power of enunciation) and agency. At the same time, admitting the historical legacy of slavery and the continued experience of racial oppression mean that races of African descent are ofttimes socially, economically, and politically positioned at the "margins" of the dominant refinement the Africanist presence remains central to the foundation of America. Although the democratic ideal, in material word s has not been realized, just as the Founding Fathers did not recognize the direct contributions of black nation in the building of the American nation, American improvement remains (always already) the yield of black style and innovation. While black cultural production itself continues to abide the problems of cross-over invention, freedom emotions (particularly white women's and gay liberation movements) music, language use, sports, and fashion are indebted to the cultural experiences of African populaces in America.(1) Similarly, while contemporary identity politics glance ats that the (monolithic) subject is now "decentered" of that kind a reconfiguration of History declare a purposes paradoxically, that the condition of the "dispersed" and the "fragmented" is the representational recent experience. Indeed, "what the discourse of the postmodern has produc is not something of the present day but a kind of recognition of where identity always was at" (Hall 114115) and as a consequence "de margin and de center" to use Mercer and Julien's phrase, is forever a tendency to meet of the twain. The crossroads of agriculture is at once both liminal and "polymorphous and multidirectional," for the junction represents the possibilities of motion (as opposed to confinement or stasis); it is the paradigmatic "scene of arrivals and departures" (Baker 7)

in the same state [i]or[/i] condition arrivals and departures form the central motif in Suzan-Lori Parks's play The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1989-1992)(2) The "death" of the play's title, however, does not portray the end of life as so for the folkloric Everyman that is the eponymous figure of the drama continues to pass throughout and through, Time and Space in a cyclical ritual of adversity and survival. Death of the Last Black Man give an account ofs therefore, in musical terms, a quintessential sky-coloreds experience: the "impulse to retain the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness" (Ellison, Shadow 78) And just as the sky-coloreds are "the multiplex, enabling script in which Afro-American cultural discourse is inscribed" (Baker 4) in such a manner Parks's play is an intricate riff forward the complexities of identity and subjectivity within the connection of an African-American cultural realm.

The play's "protagonist," Black Man With Watermelon (like his significant "Other," Black Woman With Fried Drumstick), is caught betwixt and between "de margin and de center"; he is at one time written out of History, notwithstanding placed at the center of his confess (postmodern slave) narrative. Black Man with Watermelon is able to voice his (true) Self in consequence of the personal pronoun 1, still he is forever trapped within the metaphoric parentheses of the stereotype that transcends (linear) Time as History:

(I bein in uh Now: uh Now bein in uh

Then: I bein, in Now in Then, in I will

be. I was be too yet thats uh Then thats

past. That me that was-be is uh me-has-been.

Thuh Then that was-be is uh

has-been-Then too. Thuh me-has-been

sits in thuh be-me: we sit in succession this porch.

Same porch. Same me )(126)

Such theorizing of black identity provides a counter-discourse to the dominant historical record which has serv to refuse to grant or displace the centrality of the Africanist carriage in the Western imagination. In expressions of a master/ slave dialectic, the black "Other" is encod as "Lack," that which ironically obliges to define, via its status of antithesis, the narcissistic Self of the imperial order. Parks exhibits such epistemic violence through the metaphor of the physical, sustained, hyperbolic acts of brutality that Black Man with Watermelon endures: being wrenched from his homeland; falling facing a slaveship/twenty-three floors; bursting into flames; being lynched, chased on dogs, and electrocuted. At the same time, however, Parks Signifies forward the "tragic" and sacrificial nature of the black make subordinate in literature, and the high black mortality rate in Hollywood film. As a satirical subtext to the play, Black Man with Watermelon is a revision of the folkloric trickster figure--he just continues on coming back.