The America Play
1 2019-07-11T16:31:33+00:00 Joelle Thomas 0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed96772141 1 2 Suzan-Lori Parks citation plain 2019-07-11T16:32:16+00:00 Joelle Thomas 0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed96772141This page has paths:
- 1 2021-02-16T20:07:58+00:00 Joelle Thomas 0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed96772141 Index Joelle Thomas 8 Index of all pages vispath 2021-02-16T21:16:42+00:00 Joelle Thomas 0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed96772141
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- 1 2019-07-11T16:31:37+00:00 Acts of commemoration 3 Cohen commentary page 2 plain 2019-07-15T10:24:33+00:00 We are living in a renewed age of struggle over acts of commemoration. The monuments to South Korea’s comfort women; the lynching museum that opened in Montgomery, Alabama in April 2018; the pulling down of Confederate monuments across the South: all of these index a conflict over how the past will be articulated and used in the present. These contests about memory, about access to the historical record, and about a public presence and force, cross many kinds of boundaries. They justifiably get headlines. Japan withdraws its ambassador from South Korea and threatens to remove diplomatic personnel from California because of the comfort woman sculptures; there is a deadly riot in Charlottesville, Virginia. But these conflicts are part of a wider set of disagreements, struggles, and conversations of long standing about how to represent the most divisive elements of the past. Monuments come and go, and come back, but the echoes of history they represent still circulate. So it is not just a question of presence or absence, hiddenness or exposure, but for those of us who study the history of culture, a question of how those echoes get passed on. Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play meditates eloquently on the question of such transmission. Set in an abstract space called the “Great Hole of History,” and depicting a series of interactive reenactments of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln (played by a man, perhaps a Black man, who uncannily resembles the President), one of her play’s messages is emblematized in that hole/whole pun. Nothing in the past is ever really lost, but the problem with History, the play makes vivid, is that nothing in it is really complete, either. Echoes—of the fatal gunshot, of the whispered words of the dead—proliferate in Parks’s Great Hole of History. The play’s message is an echo, itself, of William Faulkner’s never past past—yet never quite a quotation of that monument.[i]