Home Front as Warfront: African American World War I Drama
Issue Date
2010-08-31Author
Egging, Anna Katherine
Publisher
University of Kansas
Format
256 pages
Type
Dissertation
Degree Level
Ph.D.
Discipline
English
Rights
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
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This dissertation recovers little-known African American World War I plays that blur the boundary between the home front and warfront. I argue that with this focus, the plays wage their own war for African American citizenship rights, using language and performance to gain access to the "imagined" community of the nation. Yet plays from different time periods focus on diverse aspects of the Great War; these differences provide insight into how World War I was thought of and employed, and for what purposes, in African American communities during the interwar years. The project fills an important gap in African American drama, theatre, and war literature scholarship; no book-length analysis exists, yet scholarly conversations surrounding African Americans in the Great War are energetic. Despite scholars' arguments that the war "gave birth" to the New Negro, the plays that dramatize the subject have drifted into obscurity. Thus, this project is overdue; the plays complete the historical picture of African American drama and provide a better understanding of the ways contemporary life in the United States is still haunted by World War I.
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- Dissertations [4713]
- English Dissertations and Theses [449]
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