From Clashes To Integration: Adrienne Kennedy's Exploration Of Cultural Identity In Three Plays

Adrienne Kennedy (1931- ) is one of the most influential avant-garde African American female playwrights of the twentieth century. She is also a key figure in the Black Arts Movement for her unique writing style and profound themes. Departing from her contemporaries, Kennedy does not preserve the characteristics of the traditional drama. The majority of her plays are nonlinear and symbolic. She is good at using the surrealistic style to explore the African American's problem of cultural identity.Kennedy closely examines the African American's cultural identity in her canon. However, her plays which are created in different periods have different features. In her play Funnyhouse of a Negro written in the 1960s, there are irresolvable cultural clashes between the black and the white. This clash leads to the mulatto Sarah's identity crisis, her mother's madness, and father's death. Although there are similar cultural clashes in her another play A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White written in the 1970s, the protagonist Clara does not keep silent but resists the white hegemonic culture violently. However, in her play She Talks to Beethoven written in the 1980s, the cultural relationship between the black and the white has some new features, which are totally different from the cultural clashes in Funnyhouse and the cultural resistance in A Movie Star. The black Suzanne and white Beethoven coexist harmoniously. Although David's racial identity is uncertain, he has a good relationship with both the black and the white.By analyzing the theme of race and gender in her three plays, this thesis studies Kennedy's concerns about the African Americans'problem of cultural identity and her exploration of what cultural strategy the African Americans should take in their confrontation of the identity crisis brought by the white and the black cultural clashes. Under the oppression of white hegemonic culture, Kennedy believes the African Americans should resist it violently but not keep silent. When coming across the crisis of cultural identification, the African Americans should advocate the harmonious coexistence of the two cultures but not just identify with the white culture or abandon their black tradition.The cultural identity of the African American is supposed to embrace the African culture and American Culture, which is characterized by hybridity and multiplicity. Indeed, such kind of cultural identity belongs to the protagonists Sarah, Clara and Suzanne in these three plays. Kennedy's thoughts on cultural integration shed much light on today's globalized world, on both the study of other ethnic identity in the globalized society and how the different cultures coexist harmoniously in the multicultural context.