@article{ART001339517},
author={Yon-hee Chun},
title={Post-Race Logic in Suzan-Lori Parks' Topdog/Underdog},
journal={Journal of Modern English Drama},
issn={1226-3397},
year={2009},
volume={22},
number={1},
pages={109-137}
TY - JOUR
AU - Yon-hee Chun
TI - Post-Race Logic in Suzan-Lori Parks' Topdog/Underdog
JO - Journal of Modern English Drama
PY - 2009
VL - 22
IS - 1
PB - 한국현대영미드라마학회
SP - 109
EP - 137
SN - 1226-3397
AB - The winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, Suzan-Lori Parks, attracted much attention from her audiences for one of her controversial Broadway productions. On the surface, the play Topdog/Underdog has the traits of realism, a fact which gives rise to suspicions about her talents as a playwright with original avant-garde strategies. But Topdog/Underdog also presents the audience with a specific dramatic theme and methodology that have distinguished her from previous Black playwrights which had indulged in a sort of digging up hidden Black histories in a victim/victimizer paradigm. Topdog/Underdog, on the other hand, aims at an expression of the aesthetic and multifaceted aspects of life, rather than Black experience in stereotype. The lives of Lincoln and his younger brother Booth are set in a context of universality, much in the manner of Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Parks explores their existence in terms of internal and mental pain, presenting a paradigm of Black-on-Black violence while excluding the Black/White dichotomy.
Parks’ consciousness of Black history and identity has been exposed in this play just as in her previous works, however in this play she sublimates the two brother’s lives into a cosmic universality far from racial prejudice. In Topdog/Underdog, then, Parks reveals a certain social and mental alienation through the lenses of dramatic methodology, using dialect and transformation of conventional textual language and chaotic life with original and unconventional language and gesture.
In this play, Parks does not deal with a racial issue per se, but instead depicts the rigor of effort and being itself in the existential world. Ironically, the audience can not reach a conclusion about who can be, or who is, the topdog or the underdog. Parks refrains from giving a clear answer about that question and practices the work of revealing ideology.
KW - Suzan-Lori Parks;Topdog/Underdog;simulacre;differánce;deterritorialization;deconstruction
DO -
UR -
ER -
Yon-hee Chun. (2009). Post-Race Logic in Suzan-Lori Parks' Topdog/Underdog. Journal of Modern English Drama, 22(1), 109-137.
Yon-hee Chun. 2009, "Post-Race Logic in Suzan-Lori Parks' Topdog/Underdog", Journal of Modern English Drama, vol.22, no.1 pp.109-137.
Yon-hee Chun "Post-Race Logic in Suzan-Lori Parks' Topdog/Underdog" Journal of Modern English Drama 22.1 pp.109-137 (2009) : 109.
Yon-hee Chun. Post-Race Logic in Suzan-Lori Parks' Topdog/Underdog. 2009; 22(1), 109-137.
Yon-hee Chun. "Post-Race Logic in Suzan-Lori Parks' Topdog/Underdog" Journal of Modern English Drama 22, no.1 (2009) : 109-137.
Yon-hee Chun. Post-Race Logic in Suzan-Lori Parks' Topdog/Underdog. Journal of Modern English Drama, 22(1), 109-137.
Yon-hee Chun. Post-Race Logic in Suzan-Lori Parks' Topdog/Underdog. Journal of Modern English Drama. 2009; 22(1) 109-137.
Yon-hee Chun. Post-Race Logic in Suzan-Lori Parks' Topdog/Underdog. 2009; 22(1), 109-137.
Yon-hee Chun. "Post-Race Logic in Suzan-Lori Parks' Topdog/Underdog" Journal of Modern English Drama 22, no.1 (2009) : 109-137.
