Theatre Professor Published in African American Review

Assistant professor of theatre Dr. Jocelyn L. Buckner published the essay “’Spectacular Opacities’: The Hyers Sisters’ Performances of Respectability and Resistance” in the peer-reviewed
African American Review
issue 45.3,  subtitled “Special Issue: On Black Performance.” This essay analyzes the Hyers Sisters, a Reconstruction-era African American sister act, and their radical efforts to transcend social limits of gender, class, and race in their early concert careers and three major productions,
Out of Bondage
and
Peculiar Sam; or The Underground Railroad
, two slavery-to-freedom epics, and
Urlina: the African Princess
, the first known African American play set in Africa. At a time when serious, realistic roles and romantic plotlines featuring black actors were nearly nonexistent due to the country’s appetite for stereotypical caricatures, the Hyers Sisters’ positive (re)presentations of (African) American life and love were strategic, political acts of resistance against the rampant racism of Reconstruction-era America. Their pioneering productions enabled the sisters to create early opportunities for themselves and other black artists in a white, male dominated industry, and helped lay the groundwork for the growth and development of black theatre and popular entertainment in the decades to come.