AMST 377
Creative Conjure: Writing Ourselves Free in the Black American Theatre Spring 2025
Division II Writing Skills Difference, Power, and Equity
Cross-listed AFR 351 / WGSS 353 / THEA 351

For millennia, Black theater traditions have functioned as tools of ritual: in the names of witnessing, healing, way-making and world-building. In this course, we will study contemporary theater artists focused on Black magical realism and futurism, including plays from the instructor’s body of work. Using the framework of art historian Yaa Addae, this course engages “study as a tool of relation. Not domination or inspection.” Through reading, viewing and writing, ours is a query of transformation. The guiding questions for this course are: If we know “story” has the power to change the world – what can the Black theatrical archive teach us about replacing systems of harm with systems of radical care and community? Knowing we live in the creation of someone’s imagination – what happens when theater is used to imagine a world that functions in our favor? Students will be asked to view and read plays, engage with essays and create their own theatrical expressions inspired by the works of the Combahee River Collective, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Octavia Butler, Katori Hall, Kristen Adele Calhoun, Shay Youngblood, Aishah Rahman, Eric Lockley, Dr. Saidiya Hartman, Dr. Barbara Ann Teer, and more. Creative Conjure builds upon the course, Young, Gifted and Black, offered in the Fall. Where the Fall course focuses on dismantling and disrupting the status quo, the Spring course focuses on imagining and building worlds anew. Ideally, students can take both the Fall and Spring courses but it is not required to take both. Understanding sound revolutionary artmaking requires a clear foundation, our key goals will include a personal values statement from which subsequent work will be rooted. Students will also write a short play that activates the elements of our study and share excerpts of their work publicly.