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The Radical Formalism of Suzan-Lori Parks and Sarah Kane

When Suzan-Lori Parks's play Venus, about the displays of Saartjie Baartman in early nineteenth-century Europe, opened in 1996, the outrage it provoked by suggesting that its central, black character may have been complicit in her plight raised yet again one of the most inspiring and frustrating questions in modern US theatre history: how to stage the racial Other. Even the most sympathetic responses to the play revealed the difficulty of assuming a critical stance toward the racially marked body (especially the black female body) that is affectively fixed as a symbol of martyrdom and victimization. In fact, Shannon Jackson has proposed that the racially marked body's resistance to being reduced to a critical sign, free from affect, may be definitive of race as a social phenomenon. As US theatre history demonstrates, onstage this resistance is highly productive of controversy, much of which has focused on the question of which representational contracts may most accurately convey the experiences of racially marked people. In this sense, art critic Abiola Sinclair's reading of Parks's experimental aesthetic as a traitorous concession to a white theatrical tradition was unexceptional; it was a reminder of the historical efforts of African American artists to create distinctly black art.