Contact Information
Biography Information
Lisa B. Thompson is a playwright and associate professor of English at the State University of New York, Albany where she teaches courses in African American literature, drama, theory, and cultural studies. She received her BA in English and MA in African American Studies from UCLA and her PhD in Modern Thought & Literature from Stanford University. A San Francisco native, she has been awarded fellowships and research support from the University of California’s Office of the President, UCLA's Center for African American Studies, the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, the Five Colleges Inc., the Albany Chapter of the United University Professions, Inc., and Stanford University's Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Her research and creative projects focus on contemporary African American literature, performance, feminist theory and cultural studies. Her book, Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class (2009), explores black middle class female sexuality through works by African American women authors. Her critically acclaimed off-Broadway play, Single Black Female, which was nominated for a 2005 LA Weekly Theatre Award for best comedy, has been produced throughout the US; in 2010 the play received its international debut in Toronto.
Project Description
Situated at the intersection of trauma studies, African American literary studies, theatre, performance studies, and U. S. history, “Staging the Unspeakable: Cultural Trauma in African American Theatre & Performance” examines the strategies deployed by playwrights and performance artists such as Lynn Nottage, Robert O’Hara, Suzan-Lori Parks and August Wilson in their restaging of black cultural suffering. My project considers how African American theatre and performance narrate existential questions about black subjectivity in an era characterized by many commentators as “post-racial.” I am concerned with moments where plays and performance art render not only specific tragedies such as slavery, lynching, rape, and riots, but also the repetitive soul crushing quotidian slights and injuries from social, workplace and housing discrimination. I am intrigued both by instances of inter-racial trauma and by distressing intra-racial conflicts, particularly instances of racial policing that question racial authenticity based on class, sexuality or other marginalized subjectivities. I argue that the performance of such cultural narratives allows for the possibility of remembrance, calls for a more complex view of black history and identity and demonstrates trauma’s transformative potential. I also ponder the role of black theatre and performance in representing cultural or collective memory for a generation of theatre artists who may not have experienced first-hand some of the racial traumas they portray.