Academic Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences, 2024, 7(6); doi: 10.25236/AJHSS.2024.070626.
Lintong Zeng
Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin, 300387, China
In her Lincoln Plays (Topdog/Underdog and the American Play), Parks made a bold attempt: the black protagonists act President Abraham Lincoln in the play, deconstructing and recreating the black and white relationship. The paper examines how Parks highlights the presence of the black in different ways from the perspective of historical writing. Starting from the deconstruction of the grand narrative discourse in the plays, it is found that Parks uses the deconstruction of the “absence” of black people as the basis to name black people with white names and be played by black people. White people deliberately symbolize the emergence of white people, thereby reinterpreting the identity and history of black people, subverting the grand narrative methods in previous literary works and history. It shows that postmodernity in Parks’s plays is an important part that cannot be ignored in her works. Parks’s innovative attempts at postmodernity in plays are fragmented attempts at racial equality and peace in American society.
Suzan-Lori Parks, Lincoln Plays, Postmodernity, Racial Balance
Lintong Zeng. The Deconstruction of Black Absence: A Study on the Postmodernity of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Lincoln Plays. Academic Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences (2024) Vol. 7, Issue 6: 164-170. https://doi.org/10.25236/AJHSS.2024.070626.
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