수잔 로리 팍스의 포스트모던 고고학

Suzan-Lori Parks’s Postmodern Archaeology: The America Play

Parks’s The America Play deconstucts the Lincoln myth and restores African American history which was erased from history. The Foundling Father, a black digger, who is told to amazingly resemble Lincoln and whose name is both linked to the Founding Fathers and a foundling, impersonates Lincoln and repeatedly performs the assassination of Lincoln in the “Great Hole”. The repeated and revised performances show the potential to subvert hegemonic discourses and in this regard Parks’s “Rep & Rev” is related to Gates‘s “signification” and Bhabha’s “mimicry”. Parks’s project of digging history, using a variety of postmodern devices such as metadramatic elements, parody, and language play, pursues the “whole” identity of African Americans in the “hole” of history. The Foundling Father’s wife, Lucy, remembers his history and lets their son, Brazil, dig up the hole after his death. She constantly leads their son to recover the lost history in a right way. The hole symbolizes a womb which generates histories. It is the hole of creative reproduction and in this sense is the opposite of void or lack. By placing the Foundling Father in “The Hall of Wonders”, Parks’s ritualized “Rep & Rev” includes the events excluded from white history and enacts a collective mourning. Parks’s stage functions as a space to transform and reconstruct history. In this sense, Parks’s postmodern archaeology aims to subject history to Deleuzian “continuous variation” and calls for our participation in the making of new histories.