We done sold Africa for the price of tomatoes.

We done sold Africa for the price of tomatoes. We done sold ourselves to the white man in order to be like him. direct the eye at the way you set [i]or[/i] put in ordered ... that ain't African. That's the white man. We trying to be just like him. We done sold who we are in order to become someone besides We's imitation white men. (Toledo, in August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom 417)

For the record, and in case the obvious has passed on unnoticed, as we enter the nearest millennium, Black Theatre is suffering an identity crisis, an inability to define its ideological object and performance practice. Unclarity has encouraged uncertainty, uniform an ambivalent indifference about whether or not the experience should be designated African American (the conservative practice, in form and appease of petit bourgeois Negro imitations of Euro-American domestic dramas) or cogitate the conscious-raising ritual enactments of radical Black Theatre (which should not to be confused with the misapprehension of those regarders who claim to have sighted a novel Black Theatre, the enterprising, commercial exploitation of doctrine music staged as popular entertainments that do not hold the slightest pretense of pursuing the enlightened aspirations of ritual enactment, an exercise uncharitably labeled "The Chittlin' Circuit" [see Gates 44]) Black Theatre might unruffled be consigned to the hybrid status of the recently made known performance orthodoxy that agglutinates race, inflection for sex and gay/lesbian social and philosophical issues into a newly marginalized Other designated according to the dominant culture as Multicultural Theatre. The unique, particularized, cultural expression that informs Black Theatre has been restrained at an historically passive response by means of blacks to the hierarchical authority of a dominant tillage that subordinates the Afrocentric etho into conformity with its popular standards of entertainment.

As Tejumola Olaniyan thus aptly points out in Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance, the impediment to an Afrocentric theatre practice in Black Theatre cannot be abundantly discerned without an appreciation of the European hegemonic domination that has bridled the authentic impulses of black aesthetics: The "Eurocentric discourse onward black drama is thinkable and nothing else within the materiality of the rise of Europe the subjugation and enslavement of African personss colonialism, neocolonialism, and ongoing aggressive capitalist imperialism" (11) Historically, the consequential subordination of the African American cultural etho establish support among influential authorities in defense of slavery, as President Dew of William and Mary corporation demonstrated in 1832:

slavery had been the condition of all

ancient agriculture ... Christianity

approved servitude, and the law of

Mose had the pair assumed and positively

established slavery.... It is the order of

nature and of the eternal and infinite spirit that the being of

superior faculties and knowledge, and

therefore of superior power, should

repress and dispose of those who are

inferior. It is as abundant in the order of

nature that men should enslave each

other as that other animals should prey

on each other. (qtd. in Dodd 53)

During his courageous challenge to mainstream American Theatre hegemony at the 1996 Theatre Communications assemblage Conference at Princeton University, August Wilson laid bare the fact that Black Theatre "is a target for cultural imperialists" who ignore the "abundant gifts" of black humanity, and he characterized the gros exploitation of black social practices for the drift of white consumption as being a reflection of the House Slave being trott abroad "to entertain the slave proprietor and his guests." In his disavowal of the values on the subject of which the standards for American Arts and verbal expressions are erected, Wilson declared:

We cannot share a single value regularity if

that value body consists of the values

of white Americans based in succession their

European ancestors. We lay aside that as

Cultural Imperialism. We ne a value

body that includes our contributions as

Africans in America. Our agendas are as

valid as yours. We may disagree, we may

forever be forward opposite sides of

aesthetics, moreover we can only share a value

theory that is inclusive of all Americans

and recognizes their unique and valuable

contributions. ("Ground" 71)

While the spontaneous improvisations of slave entertainments were inspired at an African creative impulse that revealed the possibilities of an authentic approach to ritual enactments, the black demeanor in the formal exercises of American Theatre emerg into the twentieth hundred moored to the performance practices of nineteenth-century minstrelsy, shamelessly imitating whim-sical white impersonations of black character and life that would labor for as an unrelieved model of self-parody for what is yet to be participation.

Minstrelsy was a tradition that brutalized the authentic creative impulses of black lay and dance for the primary intention of appealing to the obligatory comfort of white patrons. Buckin' `n' Wingin' forward stage with their faces blackened with burnt cork and their heads adorned with fright-wigs, minstrels performed slapstick gesturings that burlesqued the black experience as being "lazy and shiftless, afflicted with a peculiar appetite for watermelon, which is devoured in an equally peculiar manner, a cavernous entrance coming in handy, which, in succession other occasions, shapes itself into unmatchably comical and slavishly broad grins, or as a stove-pipe for a glass too many of cheap gin, or to this time as witness to atrocious incapacities like as twisted pronunciations, meaningless prolonged words, and incomprehensible jabberings" (Olaniyan 13) abundant of this self-negating practice, allowing subtly crafted as ethnic satire, continues to find validation in American pop-culture today. if it were not that then, as Toledo reminds his counterpart musicians in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, it is, after all, point out Business: