The N-Word and Other Sticky Issues: Considering Alice Childress’s Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Relationship in Black and White in the Black Lives Matter Era

IF 0.1 0 LITERARY THEORY & CRITICISM

American, British and Canadian Studies Pub Date : 2022-12-01 DOI:10.2478/abcsj-2022-0018

T. L. Bennett

{"title":"The N-Word and Other Sticky Issues: Considering Alice Childress’s Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Relationship in Black and White in the Black Lives Matter Era","authors":"T. L. Bennett","doi":"10.2478/abcsj-2022-0018","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Alice Herndon Childress’s 1962 play Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White mines many of the issues that the most recent US race crisis has brought to the forefront, but in the twenty-first century, a long overdue shift in political climate has raised new questions regarding what is acceptable, even in the realm of art. Childress investigates oppressive forces through realistic, compelling characters and setting, and electric dialogue, yet in doing so, she employs the N-word and other disturbing epithets that discomfit contemporary students, actors, and audiences. In a time when use of such words can result in one’s being fired or sued, do the lessons of this play outweigh the turmoil that such terms can cause? This study argues that they do, with an important caveat: just as words’ meanings are contingent on their context, the positive power of the play is contingent on careful treatment of it, suggesting that current US sociopolitical crises, like those of the past, cannot be satisfactorily resolved by simple rules or mandates.","PeriodicalId":37404,"journal":{"name":"American, British and Canadian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1000,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"American, British and Canadian Studies","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2022-0018","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERARY THEORY & CRITICISM","Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Abstract

Abstract Alice Herndon Childress’s 1962 play Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White mines many of the issues that the most recent US race crisis has brought to the forefront, but in the twenty-first century, a long overdue shift in political climate has raised new questions regarding what is acceptable, even in the realm of art. Childress investigates oppressive forces through realistic, compelling characters and setting, and electric dialogue, yet in doing so, she employs the N-word and other disturbing epithets that discomfit contemporary students, actors, and audiences. In a time when use of such words can result in one’s being fired or sued, do the lessons of this play outweigh the turmoil that such terms can cause? This study argues that they do, with an important caveat: just as words’ meanings are contingent on their context, the positive power of the play is contingent on careful treatment of it, suggesting that current US sociopolitical crises, like those of the past, cannot be satisfactorily resolved by simple rules or mandates.

查看原文本刊更多论文

n字和其他棘手的问题:想想爱丽丝·蔡尔德里斯的结婚戒指:黑人的命也是命时代黑人和白人的爱/恨关系

爱丽丝·赫恩登·柴尔德里斯1962年的戏剧《婚礼乐队:黑人与白人的爱恨故事》(Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White)将最近美国种族危机带来的许多问题带到了最前沿，但在21世纪，一场姗姗姗姗来的政治气候变化提出了新的问题，即什么是可以接受的，甚至在艺术领域。柴尔德里斯通过现实的、引人注目的人物和背景，以及令人兴奋的对话来调查压迫力量，但在这样做的过程中，她使用了n字和其他令人不安的绰号，让当代学生、演员和观众感到不安。在一个使用这些词语可能导致被解雇或被起诉的时代，这出戏的教训是否超过了这些词语可能造成的混乱?这项研究认为，他们确实如此，但有一个重要的警告:正如单词的含义取决于其上下文，戏剧的积极力量取决于对它的仔细处理，这表明，当前的美国社会政治危机，就像过去一样，不能通过简单的规则或命令来令人满意地解决。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

求助全文

约1分钟内获得全文求助全文

来源期刊

American, British and Canadian Studies Arts and Humanities-Literature and Literary Theory

CiteScore

0.20

自引率

0.00%

发文量

审稿时长

10 weeks

期刊介绍： Founded in 1999, American, British and Canadian Studies, the journal of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania, is currently published by Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu. Re-launched in refashioned, biannual format, American, British and Canadian Studies is an international, peer-reviewed journal that sets out to explore disciplinary developments in Anglophone Studies in the changing environment forged by the intersections of culture, technology and electronic information. Our primary goal is to bring together in productive dialogue scholars conducting advanced research in the theoretical humanities. As well as offering innovative approaches to influential crosscurrents in contemporary thinking, the journal seeks to contribute fresh angles to the academic subject of English and promote shape-changing research across conventional boundaries. By virtue of its dynamic and varied profile and of the intercultural dialogue that it caters for, ABC Studies aims to fill a gap in the Romanian academic arena, and function as the first publication to approach Anglophone studies in a multi-disciplinary perspective. Within the proposed range of diversity, our major scope is to provide close examinations and lucid analyses of the role and future of the academic institutions at the cutting edge of high-tech. With this end in view, we especially invite contributions in the fields of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Area Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Language and Linguistics, Multimedia and Digital Arts, Translation Studies and related subjects. With its wide subject range, American, British and Canadian Studies aims to become one of the academic community’s premium scholarly resources.