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Black Leadership at the Crossroads: Unfixing Martin Luther King Jr. in Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop

Black Leadership at the Crossroads: Unfixing Martin Luther King Jr. in Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop (2011) depicts Martin Luther King Jr.’s last night alive. The play, conjecturing what may have been King’s final thoughts, reservations, desires, and fears, consists of a conversation between King and an enigmatic maid named Camae who we learn, midway through the play, is actually an angel of death. Part Wilsonian mystical realism and part Suzan-Lori Parks history play, Hall domesticates a larger-than-life figure to recalibrate the movement he personifies. I argue here that the play calls forth the conventions of a history play in order to intervene in the civil rights historiography that foregrounds King as an exemplary civil rights activist instead of a figure like Camae, a cursing, drinking former prostitute. In doing so, the play participates in a refashioning of the history play that Parks exemplifies, in which she deforms historical figures in order to reform her audience’s relationship to the past. Hall’s play contemplates the ways we know King in order to call our attention to the civil rights movement as an ongoing endeavor whose past, present, and future continues to be under necessary revision, reexamination, and production. Moreover, the play’s depiction of King in relation to Camae foregrounds the women who helped to produce the movement and the ways we, as audience members, perpetuate and contribute to civil rights history. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png South Atlantic Quarterly Duke University Press

Black Leadership at the Crossroads: Unfixing Martin Luther King Jr. in Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop

South Atlantic Quarterly , Volume 112 (2) – Mar 20, 2013

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References (19)

Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright © Duke Univ Press
ISSN
0038-2876
eISSN
1527-8026
DOI
10.1215/00382876-2020199
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop (2011) depicts Martin Luther King Jr.’s last night alive. The play, conjecturing what may have been King’s final thoughts, reservations, desires, and fears, consists of a conversation between King and an enigmatic maid named Camae who we learn, midway through the play, is actually an angel of death. Part Wilsonian mystical realism and part Suzan-Lori Parks history play, Hall domesticates a larger-than-life figure to recalibrate the movement he personifies. I argue here that the play calls forth the conventions of a history play in order to intervene in the civil rights historiography that foregrounds King as an exemplary civil rights activist instead of a figure like Camae, a cursing, drinking former prostitute. In doing so, the play participates in a refashioning of the history play that Parks exemplifies, in which she deforms historical figures in order to reform her audience’s relationship to the past. Hall’s play contemplates the ways we know King in order to call our attention to the civil rights movement as an ongoing endeavor whose past, present, and future continues to be under necessary revision, reexamination, and production. Moreover, the play’s depiction of King in relation to Camae foregrounds the women who helped to produce the movement and the ways we, as audience members, perpetuate and contribute to civil rights history.

Journal

South Atlantic QuarterlyDuke University Press

Published: Mar 20, 2013

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