Performing Passage

by Christina Knight

My dissertation examines the work of George C. Wolfe, August Wilson, Lorna Simpson and Glenn Ligon, theater and visual artists working in the 1980s and 1990s who feature representations of the Middle Passage in their work. Despite their different mediums--Wolfe and Wilson created plays for the proscenium stage and Simpson and Ligon crafted art installations--all four critiqued the racialized social retrenchment of their historical moment by linking it to the slave trade, and each did so through an engagement with black performance traditions.