(Applause Books). From the origins of the Negro spiritual and the birth of the Harlem Renaissance to the emergence of a national black theatre movement, The Theatre of Black Americans offers a penetrating look at a black art form that has exploded into an American cultural institution. Among the essays: James Hatch Some African Influences on the Afro-American Theatre; Shelby Steele Notes on Ritual in the New Black Theatre; Sister M. Francesca Thompson OSF The Lafayette Players; Ronald Ross The Role of Blacks in the Federal Theatre.

In this impressively wide-ranging study of all drama written in German in the period 1945-1977, Christopher Innes' aims are to identify the concerns and perceptions of dramatists working in a specific and unique social context and period and to analyse the major theatrical forms they developed or adapted to express their experience, to trace the writers' literary antecedents, their 'tradition' and to explore the critical issues raised by each stylistic innovation. Professor Innes has organized his discussion around the main forms of theatre - epic, documentary, absurdist and more traditional forms. Redefining these conceptual labels as he progresses, he analyses, in a critical and informed way, the work on the page and the stage of all the major playwrights. This study, which is complemented by photographs of key productions and accompanied by translations for all quotations, will be of particular interest to teachers and students of drama and German, as well as to a wider theatre-going public.

"At me too someone is looking... " —Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot In a venturesome study of corporeality and perception in contemporary drama, Stanton B. Garner, Jr., turns this awareness of the spectator's gaze back upon itself. His book takes up two of drama's most essential and elusive elements: spatiality, through which plays establish fields of visual and environmental relationship; and the human body, through which these fields are articulated. Within the spatial terms of theater, this book puts the body and its perceptual worlds back into performance theory. Garner's approach is phenomenological, emphasizing perception and experience in the theatrical environment. His discussion of the work of playwrights after 1950-including Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Peter Weiss, Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard, David Mamet, Edward Bond, Maria Irene Fornes, Caryl Churchill, and Ntozake Shange—explores the body's modes of presence in contemporary drama. Drawing on work in areas as diverse as scenographic theory, medical phenomenology, contemporary linguistics, and feminist theories of the body, Garner addresses topics such as theatrical image, stage objects, dramatic language, the suffering body, and the staging of gender, all with a view toward developing a phenomenology of mise en scene.

East, West, and Others is the first work to examine the Third World in German literature from World War II to the present. Arlene A. Teraoka investigates how prominent post?World War II East and West German authors have portrayed the Third World. She discusses the persistent stereotypes of race, culture, and sexuality in texts by authors whose careers were shaped by concerns with Third World politics. Those writers include Anna Seghers, Peter Weiss, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Heiner M_ller; East Germans Claus Hammel and Peter Hacks; and the documentary West German writers Max von der Gr_n, G_nter Wallraff, and Paul Geiersbach. Teraoka demonstrates the continuing German need to construct a postwar identity freed from the fascist past and the conflicts and clichäs that inevitably mar this dream of the self. Whether authors project a champion of humanity who upholds Enlightenment ideals or a fragmented European protagonist paralyzed by guilt, all negotiate between the forces of rationality and prejudice, universality and difference, solidarity and helplessness.

This collection of essays investigates the way Africa has been portrayed on the London stage from the 1950s to the present. It focuses on whether — and, if so, to what extent — the Africa that emerges from the London scene is subject to stereotype, and/or in which ways the reception of audiences and critics have contributed to an understanding of the continent and its arts. The collection, divided into two parts, brings together well-established academics and emerging scholars, as well as playwrights, directors and performers currently active in London. With a focus on Wole Soyinka, Athol Fugard, Bola Agbaje, Biyi Bandele, and Dipo Agboluaje, amongst others, the volume examines the work of key companies such as Tiata Fahodzi and Talawa, as well as newer companies Two Gents, Iroko Theatre and Spora Stories. Interviews with Rotimi Babatunde, Ade Solanke and Dipo Agboluaje on the contemporary London scene are also included.