Theater and Performance in the 19th Century

Theater and performance of the long 19th century (1789–1914) is one of the most dynamic fields in African American studies today. Scholars have turned to these embodied practices to understand the achievements, hardships, and imaginaries of black life in this period because enslaved and free African Americans were often denied access to, or the wherewithal to use, the archivable materials we traditionally use for historical research. The field has devised innovative methodologies and reading practices to reimagine and theorize the aesthetics, affects, labor demands, and politics of African American theater and performance in this period. These critical strategies have helped to offset some of the challenges that hinder the study of all live performance. In spite of these limitations, generative observations of theatrical and performance cultures of the enslaved and free African Americans are available, albeit often beneath layers of condemnation, mockery, and scorn. This article focuses on primary works that document, and criticism that analyzes, the origins and evolution of African American theater culture from the late 18th century up to but not including the New Negro (or Harlem) Renaissance (c. 1920). It also offers representative studies of contemporaneous dance and music that help to contextualize black theatrical practice, but it leaves the bulk of that scholarship to other bibliographies. Major archival collections, canonical play texts, and a broad range of criticism clustered in major scholarly categories of African American theater and performance of the era are included here.