A Study Of The Liminality Of Lynn Nottage’s African Writing

Lynn Nottage(1964-)is one of the most famous African American playwrights in America.Her plays mainly focus on the marginalized,and help black people,especially black women give their voice.She has won Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice.Though many scholars have studied her works from different perspectives,they pay less attention to the liminality of her works.This thesis aims to analyze the liminality in Mud,River,Stone and Ruined,both of which set in Africa,to explore that Nottage emphasizes the importance of surviving against the predicament.It will be unfolded from three levels: the spatial level,the symbolic level and the level of identity.The term “liminality” first appears in Rites of Passage,written by German anthropologist Arnold Kurr van Gennep.It means that when an individual or a group passes from one world to another they must go through a liminal period.This theory is now applied to sociology,politics,literature and other fields.This paper mainly uses Bj?rn Thomassen’s theory,which is the concept of liminality that has the potential to promote the development of society and nation.At the spatial level,Nottage chooses hotel and brothel as the spaces.The Imperial Hotel and brothel on the African continent provide a specific historical and cultural background for the development of events.In the liminal spaces,the qualities of liminality help unfold the story and have a profound influence on the characters.Both the Imperial Hotel and the brothel break the previous rules.The former allows the characters to re-position themselves,and the latter provides a space for the women who help each other and tell their stories.At the symbolic level,Nottage repeats some certain words with high frequency to attract readers’ attention.These words help to develop the events,express the themes,and emphasize the importance of maintaining their culture.This part uses the quality of liminality—ambiguity—and combines such ambiguity with the characteristics of black spoken language to conclude that Nottage emphasizes that blacks should recognize the survival predicament and it is important for them to survive from such predicament.At the level of identity,this part uses the betweenness and uncertainty of the liminal individual to conclude that Nottage puts the characters with different nationalities in a complex international environment so that they can reconsider their identity and history and recognize the importance of transition and adaptation of their identity.Nottage displays the racial predicament and the complex international situation in Africa through the description of these characters to arouse readers’ reflections.Lynn Nottage’s African American identity makes her have the insight to notice the quality of liminality.According to the manifestation of liminality in these two plays,Nottage realizes that under the complex historical background,although her race is in a survival,racial and identity predicament,the whole race must move forward.