A Grammar of Abolition: Black Theatrical Geographies

Abstract:

Black theatremakers have utilized performance to imagine and stage an alternative place where policing is abolished. They usurp the normative theatrical apparatuses to enact countergeographies that become meaningful ways to resist social control. In so doing, they inhabit (and push other artists and audiences to inhabit) theatre differently through transforming the geography of the theatre itself. Dominique Morisseau, Erika Dickerson-Despenza, Aleshea Harris, and Jordan Cooper urge us to see how their spatial construction is central to nourishing and emphasizing Black ways of knowing and being in the theatre. Through their dramaturgical structures within and beyond the plays themselves, I argue that these artists also consider how theatrical space can be manipulated to create alternative rules of engagement whereby blackness can be negotiated, produced, and known on different terms that the carceral system may dictate. In the broadest sense, I advocate for critical attention to the intersections of abolition, space, and Black theatre. This essay is about how space functions as a theatrical apparatus of anti-Black exclusion while also serving as the canvas for Black artists to revolt within, against, and in the face of anti-Black terror.