Rape – the rape or rather abduction of the Sabine women – is one of the most famous and popular tales of Roman history. It belongs among the rich stock of founding myths with which Roman historians embellished the distant origins of their city and explained the character of its social institutions. After Romulus had founded the city and killed his impudent brother, his band of male herders was in need of women to create a durable society. But the neighboring polities all refused to grant them conubium, the right of intermarriage. Not one to take no for an answer, Romulus instead resourcefully lured them into visiting the new city for a religious celebration. During the festivities, his warriors, in blatant violation of the laws of hospitality, broke in on the party and abducted the young women of the visitors. An outrageous act of betrayal, this theft called for immediate revenge; the communities which had been wronged were all up in arms. Soon the Romans had to take to the field to defend their newly won possessions and prove the worth of their young state in the test of war.

Triumph was immediate, the story goes. The first army of avenging foes to face the Roman soldiers was roundly beaten and their commanding king killed in the heat of battle by Romulus himself. Sporting the armor of his slain opponent, Romulus returned to the city in triumph and dedicated this precious booty to Jupiter Feretrius, “the striker,” and a temple to house it on the Capitol. Taking the spolia opima by killing the enemy leader on the battle field came in the Roman tradition to signify the ultimate act of heroism and military prowess; and the Romans did not blush to attach to this rare feat an explanatory legend of how might so conspicuously had made right. “Anger without strength was vain,” as Livy advised the reader of his history. Roman society had prospered at the cost of neighbors and subjects. Empire was a question of military power which prised open other communities and made their resources available to the victors. The Romans were under few illusions in this respect; their society was built on predation.

Interstate treaties in Classical Greece normally specified reciprocal trading rights; Latin citizenship was defined partly in terms of trading privileges, and the Punic Wars were fought over the control of trading zones in the central Mediterranean. The persistent reluctance of many historians in the later twentieth century to admit the extent and importance of long-distance trade in the ancient world is therefore difficult to understand, and indeed utterly incomprehensible when one considers the archaeological evidence in addition to the written record.

Long-distance trade, already important in the Hellenistic period, increased further with the gradual unification of the Mediterranean under Rome, and the virtual eradication of piracy by Pompey. By the Augustan period all the regions surrounding the Mediterranean were controlled either directly by Rome or indirectly through its client kings, and with this unified political control came a single currency throughout most of the region, common institutional frameworks in the form of laws, market supervision and regulation, and state investment in road networks, canals, and harbors. All of these greatly reduced transaction and transportation costs and facilitated the growth of trade. Many of the goods available in the markets of any city, and especially in coastal ports, were produced in the territory of another city, and often in another province; this applies to staples as well as luxuries.

Introduction

The extraction, supply, and trade in raw materials was of course fundamental to the non-agricultural sectors of the Roman economy. While the view that Roman trade was characterized more by the movement of raw materials than finished goods is wildly overstated, there was certainly a large trade in raw materials across the Roman world, with almost empire-wide distribution of materials from some sources. Long-distance trade in raw materials was of course a phenomenon that long pre-dated the Roman empire, with Bronze Age Aegean trade in copper ingots and raw glass represented in the fourteenth-century bce Uluburun wreck, and Phoenician trade in metals from Iberia to the Levant. Particularly noteworthy features of the Roman world are the direct state interest in and control of the extraction and supply of certain types of metal and stone; the corporate organization of specialist suppliers of some materials such as timber, and, in the glass industry, the overwhelming dominance of a small minority of sources of raw glass that supplied glass-blowing workshops all around the Mediterranean.

Metals

The Roman state took a strong interest in the mining of precious metals needed for the trimetallic currency used throughout the empire, either operating mines directly (under military supervision, and sometimes using slaves, condemned criminals, or tributary labor as part of the workforce), or by contracting operations to lessees. There is evidence for state control or supervision of the extraction of gold, silver, and copper; one might expect a similar interest in tin, the other main element in copper alloys, but there is no direct evidence. Lead, since it often occurs in the same ores as silver, was also often extracted under state control. In southern Britain (the Weald) it appears that iron was mined under the supervision of the Classis Britannica, probably on an imperial estate. Procuratores ferrararium for Gaul and Pannonia are attested in inscriptions.

The development of Rome and the Roman Empire would have been impossible without the development of money. The introduction of coinage was a direct consequence of Rome's expansion into Italy and soon formed a close relationship with Roman imperialism. Coined money was the medium with which the Roman armies were paid and most tributes from the provinces extracted, while imperial conquest secured control over a growing number of gold and silver mines as well as expanding the geographical radius of monetary relationships. Culturally, Roman money owed much to the Greek model, or rather, what it had grown into during the Hellenistic period: the idea of coinage; the idea of bronze coins as fiduciary money (money not backed up by ‘absolute’ value); the exchange of coins between different monetary systems; banks as places for money-changing, safekeeping of deposits, managing of payments, and making of loans; and, above all, some fundamental rules of contractual law that made credit and cashless transactions possible among a wide group of people. The Greek influence on Roman monetary practice is reflected in many Latin financial terms, such as mensa (table) for bank like the Greek trapeza also meaning table. Certain types of loan contract and banking procedures carried transliterated Greek names, such as sungrapha for witnessed loan contracts, and chirographum referring originally to an informal hand-written contract. Some terms were translated from the Greek, such as perscriptio for the Greek term diagraphe, meaning written order of payment.

Transracial performances, on and off the formal stage, can be undoubtedly traced to the early 1600s when blacks, whites, and Native Americans first began to observe and visibly transcribe their critical impressions of each other. To date, many of the scholarly treatments that address transracial performance have focused on white-bodied impersonations of minoritized people, theatrical forms that are generally recognized in relation to blackface minstrelsy. While there has been significant attention paid to representations of blackface in the past two decades (and, subsequently, theatrical portrayals of redface, yellowface, brownface, etc.), far less attention has been paid to dramatic iterations of whiteness in African American performance. There are, of course, some notable exceptions to this observation.

Scholars such as Dale Cockrell and Peter Reed have documented how whiteface performance in North America can be traced to the early nineteenth century in the Jonkonnu (or John Canoe) rituals of enslaved African Americans. These performances, with roots in West African and Caribbean traditions, were spectacular communal expressions in which elaborately costumed performers often wore “European clothing” and donned whiteface masks that were “clearly intended to represent Caucasian skin tones.” Likewise, theatre historians such as David Krasner, Errol G. Hill, James V. Hatch, and Nadine George-Graves have offered revelatory descriptions of black-authored, embodied whiteface performances on American stages. In addition, Joseph Roach and Marvin McAllister have furthered the examination of whiteface by theorizing on “whiteface minstrelsy,” thereby considering the ways in which embodied enactments of white-identified privileges and behaviors expand our understanding of African American performance and cultural expression.

In a 1994 Time magazine cover piece on black creativity, noted scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. tracked the various “renaissances” of black art in the United States. Gates defined three movements of the twentieth century: the rise of literary figures at the turn of the century, including writer and activist W. E. B. Du Bois and poet Paul Laurence Dunbar; the fabled Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s; and then, almost as an afterthought, the Black Arts Movement, deeming it the “most short-lived of all” and, by the 1970s, “dead.” While his chronological history quantifies the small moment in time in which the Movement occurred, Gates fails to identify the impact of the Movement on today’s artists. Black Arts was not so much a movement in time, but rather an overlapping of artistic expressions and political transformations during a heightened moment in America’s history. The art and ideas shared and produced during Black Arts not only affected those involved at the time, but also those who came after. As Larry Neal wrote in a seminal essay on Black Arts, “If art is the harbinger of future possibilities, what does the future of Black America portend?” In viewing the trajectory of Black theatre, it is clear the Movement’s philosophies reverberate in the plays of artists such as Ntozake Shange, August Wilson, and Suzan-Lori Parks.

Since the Black Arts Movement spans a decade of artists and work, theatrical and poetic, visual and musical, this chapter examines the Black Arts Movement through one of its key players: Amiri Baraka, the Movement’s undeclared founder, poet, and playwright. In-depth case studies of Baraka’s 1964 play Dutchman and the short-lived Black Arts Repertory and School demonstrate the complex relationships between the political undergirding of the Movement and its artistic creations. While Dutchman came before the assassination of Malcolm X and Baraka’s total disillusionment with black–white equality, the play foreshadows Baraka’s growing rage spurred by the nascent Black Nationalist Movement. It is the play’s precarious position and Baraka’s own transitional growth that makes the reading of Dutchman so important to understanding Black Arts.

A wolf by the ears

On August 22, 1831, a slave named Nat Turner unleashed a bloody uprising in Southampton County, Virginia that terrified white Southerners, galvanized white abolitionists, and inspired generations of black revolutionaries. After his capture, Turner recounted tales of butchering women and children, and of hacking to death the white owners who had oppressed slaves for decades. Turner’s rebellion ignited an equally vicious backlash among whites who tortured slaves suspected of complicity in the plot. Even slaves who had no prior knowledge of Turner’s plans were regarded with suspicion and often harshly treated as a pre-emptive measure against any future stirrings of revolt – as the Richmond Enquirer noted, “Rumors are sufficient to keep alive the vigilance of the people.”

Yet in the midst of the panic and terror, the one emotion that seemed noticeably absent was surprise. While some newspapers professed puzzlement that a slave who had been taught to read and write, and who had received no “cause or provocation,” would rebel, those accounts highlight the widespread understanding that slavery was an inherently violent system and that slave rebellions were “not isolated and infrequent events.” By underscoring Turner’s gentle treatment prior to the rebellion, the newspapers tacitly acknowledged that there were masters who behaved brutally toward their slaves. As their tone suggests, whites realized on some level that the violence embedded in the state of slavery was only held in check by a kind of mutual compact between blacks and whites. Whites understood that black subjugation had to be enforced with a measure of violence, but not to such an extent that blacks would rebel.

1. What is a black play?

2. A black play is angry.

3. A black play is fierce.

4. A black play is double voiced but rarely confused.

5. A black play got style.

6. A black play is of the people by the people and for the people.

7. A black play is smooth but not slick, heavy but not thick, can’t be tamed, often does not comb its hair, wipes its mouth with the back of its black hand or with a linen napkin whichever is more readily available.

8. A black play is late.

9. A black play is RIGHT ON and RIGHT ON TIME.

10. A black play is deep.

11. A black play is armed / to the teeth.

12. A black play bows to god then rows the boat ashore.

13. A black play makes do if it got to / fights / screams / sings / dreams / WORKS IT / talks in code and tells it like it is ALL UP IN YA FACE.

14. A black play gives you five.

15. A black play is robust and alive.

16. A black play is in the house and looking good, too.

17. A black play is bad motherfucker.

18. A black play does not exist.

19. Every play is a black play.

20. SAY WHAT?

On September 17, 1821, a company of actors of African descent performed Shakespeare’s Richard III for an audience of black spectators at New York City’s African Grove pleasure garden. The production was the inaugural offering of the African Theatre, founded by a former merchant seaman named William Alexander Brown. For three years, the African Theatre performed at various venues in New York City. Brown and his troupe sparked the interest of many African American patrons, and aroused curiosity and some hostility among white New Yorkers, before the company quickly disbanded (for reasons that are unclear to historians). This troupe is now celebrated as “the first known black theatre company in North America,” with William A. Brown recognized as “the true father of African American theatre.” The African Theatre introduced New York audiences to the first production of a black playwright’s script (with William A. Brown’s own The Drama of King Shotaway), and to the first African American actors renowned for dramatic acting: James Hewlett and Ira Aldridge.

The African Theatre was the first step in a more far-reaching movement of African American theatre artists and audiences away from mainstream professional activities, toward participation in new venues and situations that they could more readily identify as their own. Despite this important first step, the obstacles facing black theatre artists in America during the 1800s were formidable. White corporate impresarios ruthlessly controlled Broadway and the nation’s major touring circuits. These producers mostly peddled products of proven profitability: melodramas, variety shows, and musical diversions. Within that commercialized landscape, the status of African Americans was marginal. Only falsified, demeaning roles existed for aspiring black actors; opportunities for African American playwrights, directors, and designers were all but unheard of in the professional American theatre.

In an anthology of criticism about African American theatre, an essay about African Diaspora drama may initially seem out of place because many of the authors and plays that can be grouped under this heading originate from and concern life outside the United States. Yet the inclusion is appropriate, for self-identification as black has always exceeded the nation-state. While the Jamaican born, Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay lamented that his “long-suffering race … denied a human place” both in the “Christian West” and on the African Continent had, in fact, “no home on earth,” “enslaved” people of African descent have sought to identify and create a home: that is, a material and psychic space where their worth is acknowledged. “Diaspora” has functioned as a concept that has allowed them to posit a space of nurturance in the world. Indeed, as I will demonstrate, many African American playwrights, theorists, and audiences have not only posited emotional and political links with non-US black populations but have also looked outside these geographical confines for aesthetic concepts to guide their construction of theatre.

Despite a dehumanization that has persisted since the sixteenth-century establishment of the transatlantic slave trade, ideas concerning African or black solidarity have assumed many forms over historical time. Beginning with a review of ways in which the African Diaspora has been conceptualized, I propose several different categories of African Diaspora drama. The first two build upon the pioneering scholarship of W. E. B. Du Bois and Melville Herskovits, while the others reflect my own practices, developed over years of study and teaching. My objective is to identify ways in which similarity and difference – the paradoxical poles around which diaspora is enacted – have been articulated. I concentrate on written texts because up until relatively recently, these dramas circulated more easily than performers or videotape, and YouTube was non-existent. Though the African Diaspora is multilingual, this chapter concentrates on texts readily available in English.