• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.1
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• pp.129-147
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• 2008

Since the beginning of her dramatic career, Suzan-Lori Parks has considered digging up and restoring African-American history buried under the dominant white Anglo-Saxon history as her mission as a playwright. In Red Letter Plays, she attempts what Deborah Geis called "canon-critique" by taking canonical work by Nathaniel Hawthorne and casting an African-American character as the main character and describing her oppression as an African-American female. This paper argues that Suzan-Lori Parks accuses the oppressive social system by restoring and representing the history of sexual, economic, and racial exploitation that African-American females had to suffer through the dominant image of body and blood. Parks had to rewrite the history of black female characters on their bodies and in the blood because their bodies have been the ultimate object of revulsion and attraction in the perspective of white male. While abhorring and despising Hester La Negrita's abject body, male characters in In the Blood nonetheless not only exploit her sexually and economically but also impregnate her. Hester resorts to her only means of revolting against this oppressive system; she kills her most beloved son and writes "A" on the floor with his blood. Likewise, Hester Smith in Fucking A, who wears "A" on her bosom like Hester Prynne, which in this case means "abortionist," "saves" her son from the hunters by slitting his throat. Abundant graphic and sensational images written on black female body and in the blood are Parks's dramatic strategy to rewrite the forgotten and hidden history of black women's history.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.315-332
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• 2009

The purpose of this paper is to scrutinize how Parks recalling, deconstructing and reconstructing African-American memories of the absences in American history through a black Lincoln impersonator named, The Foundling Father or The Lesser Known. Parks unearths and reconstitutes a significance for the historical event of Lincoln's assassination by repetitive mimicry and verbal puns. As a pun of the Founding Father, the Foundling Father reminds us of Abraham Lincoln, one of the most venerated figures in American history. In the first act, the black Foundling Father performs as The Great Man. This inverted minstrel show of the black Foundling Father performing a white Lincoln exposes the desire of the Foundling Father to insert his narrative within the history of America. With a series of assassinations, the African-American performers figuratively murder the power and control of the American myth. In the second act, his wife Lucy and his son Brazil dig relics from the past out of 'The great hole of history' instead of the Foundling Father. Digging and burial for African-Americans are their livelihood and their calling as well. As Parks pointed out, they should locate the ancestral buried ground, dig for bones and find bones because so much of African-American history has been unrecorded, dismembered and washed out. Parks leaves the possibilities of digging and burying on the black history through Lucy and Brazil.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.253-270
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• 2007

The purpose of this paper is to illuminate how Suzan-Lori Parks reveals colonized oppression and violence in a black woman's body in Venus. The body of Hottentot Venus is an 'object' of white male spectators' gazes and a dissection from a medical study. The report on her pathologic anatomy gives the audience the illusion that the body of a black woman is inferior to those of others. Not only 'subjective' aesthetics, but also 'objective' medicine makes us confuse 'fact' with 'truth' about black women. By publicly exhibiting her erotic body, Venus is represented as a singular emblem for nineteenth-century colonial discourse on race and sexuality. Her body stands for the powerful signifier of raped Africa. A distinctive feature of black Venus is her raciality. The ownership of her body is only transferred from Mother-Showman to Doctor Baron. She had no right to her ownership. Her body is an object of hatred and curiosity and at the same time a site which is represented by conflicting desires. Parks' eventual goal in Venus is to investigate 'hindsight' of Venus Hottentot, 'the past' and 'the posterior'. As the meaning of original chocolate can be regained, the insulted and damaged body of Venus should also be recovered and resurrected.