Confederates

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Confederates

About the image used onstage


Recurring themes in Confederates revolve around a historical photo of a Black woman breastfeeding a white baby—it’s one of the first things you see in the play, and the image and the trauma behind it factor in at several points throughout the story. In their essay “Mother’s Milk,” Emily West and R. J. Knight write, “Wet-nursing is a uniquely gendered kind of exploitation, and under slavery it represented the point at which the exploitation of enslaved women as workers and as reproducers literally intersected … constituting a distinct aspect of enslaved women’s commodification.” For more information, please visit production dramaturg Angela M. Farr Schiller’s research page on the subject.

 

 

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Ta-Nehisi Coates

Author Ta-Nehisi Coates

“Rupturing the narrative”

One of Dominique Morisseau’s inspirations for writing Confederates was a landmark 2011 article by Ta-Nehisi Coates published in The Atlantic, titled “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?” An excerpt: “In our present time, to express the view of the enslaved—to say that the Civil War was a significant battle in the long war against bondage and for government by the people—is to compromise the comfortable narrative. It is to remind us that some of our own forefathers once explicitly rejected the republic to which they’d pledged themselves, and dreamed up another country, with slavery not merely as a bug, but as its very premise. It is to point out that at this late hour, the totems of the empire of slavery—chief among them, its flag—still enjoy an honored place in the homes, and public spaces, of self-professed patriots and vulgar lovers of ‘freedom.’ It is to understand what it means to live in a country that will never apologize for slavery, but will not stop apologizing for the Civil War.”

In a subsequent interview with NPR, Coates goes on to say, “There's a kind of avoidance, where we haven’t yet learned to confront the fact that [the Civil War] was a war for the establishment of a republic based in white supremacy. And it failed. And it’s a very, very good thing that it failed.”

 

 

Book cover: Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome

A Legacy of Healing

Dr. Joy DeGruy’s seminal book Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury & Healing explores how African Americans developed attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to survive the trauma of enslavement, Jim Crow, and current-day racial terrorism—and proposes strategies for building upon the strengths African Americans have gained from the past to heal from injuries both past and present. Dr. DeGruy’s website has a wealth of information on the topic—in particular, explore the pull-down Resources tab for further reading and exploration.

 

 

Forbes logo

“The trauma that has been passed down through each generation”

Author Janice Gassam Asare examines the long legacy of American slavery that African Americans still deal with—from learned helplessness to health outcomes, colorism, and “respectability politics”—in her Forbes article “3 Ways Intergenerational Trauma Still Impacts the Black Community Today.”

 

 

Still photo of Daniel Kaluuya in <i>Get Out</i>

Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out

Racial Battle Fatigue

This syndrome, described by social psychologist William Smith as a “public health and mental health illness,” has very real physical consequences. “People of Color,” Smith says, “experience daily battles of attempting to deflect racism, stereotypes, and discrimination in predominately white spaces and must always be on guard or wary of the next attack they may face.” Read about the causes and symptoms in this article in Medium.

 

 

Logo: The Highlight by Vox

“The intersectionality wars”

The conflicts in Confederates are rooted in the concept of intersectionality, a phrase coined in 1989 by scholar Kimberlé W. Crenshaw to describe how a person’s race, gender, class, and other characteristics intersect and overlap, affecting how that person sees, and is seen by, those around them. An in-depth 2019 article in Vox traces how this concept “has, in a sense, gone viral over the past half-decade, resulting in a backlash from the right…. But Crenshaw isn’t seeking to build a racial hierarchy with black women at the top. Through her work, she’s attempting to demolish racial hierarchies altogether.”


WATCH

Professor Carol Anderson

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Nation’s Divide

See the engaging and energizing speaker Carol Anderson, Chair of African American Studies at Emory University, in a one-hour talk on white rage—the longstanding political and social policies of oppression that led to the fiery uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, and many other uprisings in our time. See why this electrifying talk has had nearly 5 million views on Youtube.

 

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—two TED Talks

Adichie, a prolific Nigerian author who was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2015, has delivered two wildly popular TED Talks. The TED organization says of her lecture “We Should All Be Feminists,” “In this classic talk that started a worldwide conversation about feminism, Adichie asks that we begin to dream about and plan for a different, fairer world—of happier men and women who are truer to themselves. Her other TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” “warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.”


LISTEN

Literary Arts podcast artwork

To See Ourselves

Playwright Dominique Morisseau and OSF Artistic Director Nataki Garrett, who directed Confederates, sat down for a one-hour conversation for the Literary Arts Archive Project podcast. Morisseau (see her Notes from the Playwright about this play) says that she began thinking of Confederates because she wanted to see herself, a Black woman, in history. Morisseau and Garrett have a lot to talk about on that subject, and on their experiences as Black women working in the culture of American theatre—and working to expand that culture and bring in a wider audience.

 

 

Dr. Joy DrGruy podcast screen shot

Trans-Generational Trauma and Race Relations

Dr. Joy DeGruy (see “Read” section above) is joined in conversation by CIIS Dean of Diversity and Inclusion Denise Boston in a one-hour podcast on how trans-generational trauma and systems of oppression have influenced race relations in America today. Presented by the California Institute for Integrated Studies (CIIS) Public Programs Series.


Our thanks to the production dramaturg of Confederates, Angela M. Farr Schiller, for generously sharing these resources.