Dossett, Kate. Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2020. pp. 338.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Race discrimination; African American children; African American artists; African American authors; Black people; Lynching; African Americans

According to Dossett, Black-authored plays such as I Liberty Deferred i , I Stars and Bars i , I Natural Man i , I Big White Fog i , I Panyared i , and I Go Down i Moses - even when they remained unstaged - made the Federal Theatre "bolder" and "expanded the parameters of what was imagined possible for American theater in the Federal Theatre Project" (p. 251). Kate Dossett's book I Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal i addresses a crucial aspect of American theater history about which so far little is known: the rich and productive work of the African American theater units of the government-sponsored Federal Theatre Project (FTP). Dossett's minute archival work, however, reveals how these manuscripts were shaped in complex processes of negotiation between Black performance communities and white FTP administrators. [Extracted from the article]