포스트모던 미국극에 나타난 정체성 정치학

Identity Politics in Postmodern American Drama : Suzan-Lori Parks

This paper examines the ways in which the politics of identity has evolved in American postmodern drama, concentrating on Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World. As an influential political discourse, identity politics has provided a useful tool for larger political goals toward social advancement for African Americans, but by the time Parks was producing her major plays in the late 1980s and early 1990s, its influence has been considerably undermined by so-called ‘post-identity’ discourses. Identity-based politics has become a kind of "philosophical punching-bag," facing sustained attacks from all sides. Producing her major plays during the controversies surrounding identity politics, Parks tried to maintain the political edge of the category of race without resorting to racial essentialism. As a solution to the issue, she repudiated essentialist notion of blackness and instead dramatized multiple and mutable black identities, while at the same time consistently addressing racial issues in her unique postmodern style. The result is a postmodern drama of resistance that critiques racialist discourse as manifested in the resignifying of racial stereotypes and the envisioning of ritualized black communities.