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Waiting for Godot and the Racial Theater of the Absurd

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 March 2022

Shane Vogel
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Abstract

This essay argues that the 1957 Black-cast revival of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot stages an Africana absurd sensibility that precedes and supersedes European philosophies of absurdism. While the Continental absurd developed as a repudiation of Western reason and aspired to a universalizing assessment of the human condition, the Africana absurd is situated in the historical formation of racial slavery and colonialism. More specifically, the Africana absurd is a response to the formal meaninglessness and incoherencies of Western racial logic. Locating it within the existential and historical situation of Black theater in the Jim Crow era and attending to theatrical elements such as casting, stage props, and choreography, this essay shows how the production recasts Beckett's absurdism, metatheatricality, and antihumanism to present, rather than represent, the felt absurdity of racial modernity.

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Essays
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PMLA , Volume 137 , Issue 1 , January 2022 , pp. 19 - 35
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Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Modern Language Association of America

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Footnotes

I am grateful to Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones, Jr., and Paige McGinley for valuable conversations about this material.

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