Parks, Suzan-Lori - Jacqueline Wood (essay date June-December 2001)
Jacqueline Wood (essay date June-December 2001)
SOURCE: Wood, Jacqueline. “Sambo Subjects: ‘Declining the Stereotype’ in Suzan-Lori Parks's The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World.” Studies in the Humanities 28, nos. 1 & 2 (June-December 2001): 109-20.
[In the following essay, Wood examines Parks's use of characterization and speech in The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World to destabilize and refute black stereotypes.]
The focal presence of stereotyped characters in Suzan-Lori Parks's second play1 The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World causes discomfiture as well as a sense of alienation in its readers/spectators. And this is not a surprising response. The grotesquerie of stereotype can be both debilitating and destructive, creating, as Frantz Fanon argues, an individual who is an “object in the midst of other objects[,] sealed into that...
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