Anna Deavere Smith deserves a long train trip to discover her theater, a direct and beautiful heritage from slavery promising a fair prominent place to Black creativity in the USA soon if not already in the making. The USA has reached this stage when white criminals, police or not, who kill Black people with no reason at all except their racism are convicted in court to heavy prison sentences.
To approach a play like "House Arrest" requires that we take one or two excerpts and that we make a fine commentary of these excerpts to show:
1- How they work linguistically.
2- How they work on the historical level (of the USA, of Blacks in the USA, of slavery, and all the forms of segregation that followed and are still present).
3- How they work at the cultural level (cultural identification of African-Americans in the US which necessarily involves the recognition of the PTSS of slavery).
4- How they work at the psychic, psychological, psycholinguistic, and cognitive levels.
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Explicit Racial & Racist Bias
1.
2. TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION (bilingue, bilingual)
Il faudra bien plus qu’une seule messe…
It will take much more than one single mass …
ARTICLE PRINCIPAL (français, avec citations longues bilingues)
L’HISTOIRE, RÉVÉLATRICE DISSIMULATION
ou
HISTORY, A WHITEWASHING APOCALYPSE
NOTES DE LECTURE (Toutes bilingues – All bilingual)
TOM TAYLOR – NOTRE COUSIN D’AMÉRIQUE – 1865 – CACHEZ CE SANG
BLEU QUE JE NE SAURAIS BOIRE
JEAN GENET – HAUTE SURVEILLANCE – 1949 – LA LIBÉRATION DANS LA
MORT PROMISE PAR LA LAME
JEAN GENET – LE CONDAMNÉ À MORT ET AUTRES POÈMES SUIVI DE LE
FUNAMBULE – NRF GALLIMARD – 1999 (1942,1945, 1947, 1948, 1958,1979) –
DÉPENDANCE AMOUREUSE TOTALE ET MORBIDE
BERTRAND TAVERNIER – DEATHWATCH – LA MORT EN DIRECT – 1980 –
UNE APOCALYPSE DE PLUS
DEATHWATCH – 2002 – ANACHRONIQUE – LA GUERRE N’EST QUE VANITÉ
PERVERSE
4. Gradual Moral Slippage
Anna Deavere-Smith explores in this play a fundamental theme in
American history, the fact that basic ethical and social issues are caught up
in a systematic drift – a downward slippage in her terms – that reduces them
to superficial events without any deep value. Thus, the issue of slavery is
ignored and replaced by the failures and missteps of Bill Clinton with a
Caucasian intern in the White House. The press has become an essential
part of the President's staging of himself (not herself yet) and his action.
This already old play (end of the previous century) could not take into
account the evolution of the last twenty years, and yet it shows something
essential. When agitprop theater tries to reveal something hidden by an
artificial ideological construction, it identifies a tree that was hidden, but this
tree in turn hides the forest and conceals something else. Denouncing the
crime against humanity that slavery was in the United States is tantamount
to hiding the extraordinary resistance of the slaves who thus produced the
ferment that gave rise to a world culture that is now largely dominant. If we
only see the whip, we forget the rhythmic melodies of the slaves who thus
controlled their productivity and produced our present culture. Any
simulation may reveal a hidden truth, a revelation in Biblical meaning, an
apocalypse, but it, in turn, hides another truth. Doesn't agitprop theater itself
become a downward slippage which brings some good feeling to
Huckleberry Finn, but what about human history after Bill Clinton’s sexual
slippage?