Department of Art, Media, Performance and Design Faculty Books and Book Chapters

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  Black Theater, City Life: African American Art Institutions and Urban Cultural Ecologies

  Macelle Mahala

  Macelle Mahala’s rich study of contemporary African American theater institutions reveals how they reflect and shape the histories and cultural realities of their cities. Arguing that the community in which a play is staged is as important to the work’s meaning as the script or set, Mahala focuses on four cities’ “arts ecologies” to shed new light on the unique relationship between performance and place: Cleveland, home to the oldest continuously operating Black theater in the country; Pittsburgh, birthplace of the legendary playwright August Wilson; San Francisco, a metropolis currently experiencing displacement of its Black population; and Atlanta, a city with forty years of progressive Black leadership and reverse migration.
  
  Black Theater, City Life looks at Karamu House Theatre, the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, Pittsburgh Playwrights’ Theatre Company, the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, the African American Shakespeare Company, the Atlanta Black Theatre Festival, and Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre Company to demonstrate how each organization articulates the cultural specificities, sociopolitical realities, and histories of African Americans. These companies have faced challenges that mirror the larger racial and economic disparities in arts funding and social practice in America, while their achievements exemplify such institutions’ vital role in enacting an artistic practice that reflects the cultural backgrounds of their local communities. Timely, significant, and deeply researched, this book spotlights the artistic and civic import of Black theaters in American cities.

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  Against order(s): Dictatorship, absurdism and the plays of sony labou tansi

  Macelle Mahala

  Congolese playwright, director and novelist Sony Labou Tansi created a large body of work during his most prolific period, the late 1970s to mid-1990s, while living through a series of political coups and authoritarian governments.1 For two decades, Tansi’s plays, novels and essays offered an array of diverse forms of resistance to dictatorship. Alternately celebrated for his international success,2 harassed by state authorities,3 and posthumously accused of ethnic factionalism,4 Tansi’s career is a searing example of an artist writing through authoritarian conditions and political upheavals. Educated under a repressive colonial system, Tansi witnessed independence and the establishment of a Marxist state, participated in political efforts that brought about the creation of a new constitution and the emergence of an ostensibly multiparty democratic system in 1992, and suffered from the state of violence and chaos into which the Congo was plunged after the parliamentary elections of 1993 were contested and the nation entered a prolonged period of civil strife that eventually escalated into civil war. At the end of his life Tansi suffered personally for his political activities when his passport was revoked; the medical treatment he sought for himself and his wife in France for their AIDS-related illness was fatally delayed and they both died upon their return to the Congo in 1995 (Thomas 2002: 57; Kirkup 1995: n.p.).

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  Hydraulic metaphor: A model of global and local connectivity

  Dennis O. Flynn and Marie Lee

  Trade histories normally focus on exports/imports between port cities, yet actual trade is (and always has been) far more complex than mere bilateral coast-to-coast exchange. While a particular hinterland may indeed produce a negligible proportion of a particular item, it is sometimes the case that combined hinterland output dominates. By the same token, relatively little of a commodity may end up in a single hinterland location, yet hinterland end-markets combined can dominate. Historical neglect of hinterlands is at least partly due to inadequacies inherent in conventional supply and demand concepts at the foundational building-blocks level of economic theory.

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  Penumbra: The Premier Stage for African American Drama

  Macelle Mahala

  Penumbra Theatre Company was founded in 1976 by Lou Bellamy as a venue for African American voices within the Twin Cities theatre scene and has stood for more than thirty-five years at the intersection of art, culture, politics, and local community engagement. It has helped launch the careers of many internationally respected theatre artists and has been repeatedly recognized for its artistic excellence as the nation’s foremost African American theatre.

  Penumbra is the first-ever history of this barrier-breaking institution. Based on extensive interviews with actors, directors, playwrights, producers, funders, and critics, Macelle Mahala’s book offers a multifaceted view of the theatre and its evolution. Penumbra follows the company’s emergence from the influential Black Arts and settlement house movements; the pivotal role Penumbra played in the development of August Wilson’s career and, in turn, how Wilson became an avid supporter and advocate throughout his life; the annual production of Black Nativity as a community-building performance; and the difficult economics of African American theatre production and how Penumbra has faced these challenges for nearly four decades.

  Penumbra is a testament to how a theatre can respond to and thrive within changing political and cultural realities while contributing on a national scale to the African American presence on the American stage. It is a celebration of theatre as a means of social and cultural involvement—both local and national—and ultimately, of Penumbra’s continuing legacy of theatre that is vibrant, diverse, and vital.

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  More Votes That Count: A Case Study in Voter Mobilization

  Robert Benedetti, Randall Collette, Brett DeBoer, Qingwen Dong, Austin Erdmann, Ben Goodhue, Nathan Monroe, Erin O'Hara, Alan Ray, Jon F. Schamber, Keith Smith, Dari E. Sylvester, Lisa Tromovitch, and Paul Turpin

  This collection grew from the experience of a group of scholars at the University of the Pacific who were challenged by the San Joaquin County Registrar of Voters to reduce voter error, improve poll worker-training, and increase voting by mail (absentee voting). The project was supported by funds from the help America Vote Act (HAVA), legislation passed in the wake of Florida's experience in the 2000 presidential election, and by the Pew Foundation for the States. Its immediate context was a controversy in California over the use of voting machines, a controversy that resulted in a return to the use of paper balloting at least for the near term. Both the Florida experience and the controversy in California reflect a growing realization that the electoral system itself has influenced the outcomes of elections rather than provided a level playing field for all candidates and all voters. In addition, the costs and potential costs of elections have skyrocketed with the increasing participation of media consultants, equipment manufacturers, and data specialists. In other words, the voting system is increasingly political and expensive in itself. Can and should such trends be reversed? The experience of San Joaquin County and research at the University of the Pacific shed light on this important question.