This book features African American women playwrights from 1875 to 2000, with an emphasis on the late nineteenth century, a period rarely treated in regard to women’s drama. Highlighting the lesser-known Pauline Hopkins, Angelina Weld Grimké, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Eulalie Spence, and May Miller, and the well-known Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Childress, Adrienne Kennedy, and Ntozake Shange, Peculiar Passages argues that these playwrights’ efforts define a tradition characterized by quick-change mobility, sensitivity to vernacular forms, and dedication to intertextual dialogue. Situating the plays within a broader context, the book also connects them to minstrelsy, the Passion Play, and the Black Arts Movement.

The Author: Carol Allen is Associate Professor of English at Long Island University. She is a poet, African Americanist, and Americanist, and has written on African American female humor, Alice Childress, and lynching photography. She is the author of Black Women Intellectuals: Strategies of Nation, Family, and Neighborhood in the Works of Pauline Hopkins, Jessie Fauset, and Marita Bonner and holds a Ph.D. in literature from Rutgers University.