The musicality of language: redefining history in Suzan-Lori Parks's 'The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World.'

From: African American Review | Date: December 22, 1997| Author: Bernard, Louise | Copyright information

Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks' play 'The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World' represents musically the complexities of identity and subjectivity in a African American cultural context. At once dialogic poetry and historical document, the play uses jazz/blues music to explore Black identity as against the displaced or denied centrality of the Africanist presence in the Western imagination.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in his The Signifying Monkey. A Theory of African-Ame...

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