Dynamics of power in white and black: Alice Childress as feminist and anti-colonialist in 'Florence', 'Trouble in Mind', and 'Wine in the Wilderness'

Through a close-reading of three representative plays by Alice Childress, this study means to underscore the playwright's proficient feminist and anti-colonial vision. Though largely neglected by critics, Childress has, presciently, investigated the overall colonial condition which, despite propagandistic claims of equality, still constricts America's blacks (especially women), and keeps them under a myriad of cultural, socioeconomic, and political enslavement. Surprisingly, Childress manifests clear command of deconstructive thought long before deconstruction comes to surface, a technique by which she effectively exhibits the masked contradictions within the fabric of power ideologies.; As a feminist, Childress primarily celebrates the defiant mechanisms of ordinary black women, and so appoints them as active agents of black struggle and self-dependence. Among the many feminist precepts that Childress asserts through her females are: definition of self away from a male, economic independence, free thinking and free choice in life, gender equality, female bonding, dismissal of softness or sex appeal as necessary female attributes, knowledge and deployment of racial heritage, and dismissal of the charge of black matriarchy—all to counter the limitations imposed by a patriarchal society in which the combination of a woman and black creates an impasse beyond escape.; As an anti-colonialist, Childress exposes the condition of internal colonization under which blacks are separated and humiliated typically like the natives in any traditional colonial situation. While identifying the power dynamics at play in the white black encounters—the whites' use of binary oppositions and stereotyping to remain in control, exclusionary politics to immobilize ambitious blacks, colonial discourse and ideological practices to disseminate power and valorize the sense of superiority , and denial of blacks' political, educational and economic rights, to mention a few—Childress also assaults the replicated power dynamics that the assimilationist middle-class blacks use against powerless blacks.; Assigning no black male to serve her goals, Childress hands the responsibility of subversion to black women, who, in the main, depend solely on their own potentials—talking back, telling counter narratives, questioning the false assumptions of the powerful, leading a “sit-in,” and eluding the colonizers' gaze are some of the many anti-colonial mechanisms that Childress's women have successfully employed.