My article “‘Will Blackness Please Step Out and Take a Curtain Call?’: Ed Bullins’s Conceptual Theatre” appears in the latest issue of Modern Drama (62.3, Fall 2019) published by University of Toronto Press. It’s my first publication in a top-tier peer-reviewed scholarly journal! Access it here.
I suggest that the Black Theatre Movement’s investment in contemplation and interiority catalyzed a dematerialized Black Conceptualism at the interface of closet drama and Conceptual Art, key to the formation of a genre I call the “Conceptual Play” and an archive I call “Conceptual Theatre.”
I’m grateful to Modern Drama’s editor R. Darren Gobert for his immensely helpful guidance, as well as the anonymous readers. I’m also grateful to Leslie Bow, Aida Levy-Hussen, Laurie Beth Clark, Michael Peterson, Ramzi Fawaz, and Jon McKenzie, who provided invaluable feedback on numerous drafts of the article and the dissertation chapter on which it’s based. Talking through the ideas with Andrew Salyer, Craig Werner, Julia Monique Meuse, and Leigh Elion was also crucial to my process.
