Document Type : Original Article

Authors

• Saeid Ganjkhanloo ¹
• Esmaeil Najar ²

¹ Kharazmi University

² College of Art, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

The African-American playwright Adrienne Kennedy is known for her avant-garde approach and powerful indictment of racism. Her poetic and dreamy style of writing, molding simultaneously myth and personal experiences, has made her oeuvre delightful and indelible. Kennedy gives voice to the unrepresented thoughts and emotions that her plays’ characters carry with themselves from the early childhood. Kennedy’s works, similar to other black writers like Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire and Suzanne Césaire, are rich with surrealistic features and elements, which allows her to pursue the demand for freedom and liberation. This sort of surrealism, also called afro-surrealism, is anti-colonial and anti-racist in its black aestheticism. It is identified with the colors, dream imagery, and sounds, which are embedded in the African-American imagination and its artistic incarnations. Adrienne Kennedy’s work straddles the long line of surrealist traditions and calls upon a gender-oriented interpretation of racism that is represented through her female protagonists. In this play, we examine how surreal concepts and their implications in Funnyhouse of a Negro are used to emancipate the oppressive thoughts and metaphorically challenge the social framework, if not in real world, in the world of drama.

Keywords

• Surrealism
• Automatic Writing
• Femininity
• Racism
• Community