'Post-black' refers to an emerging trend within black arts to find new and multiple expressions of blackness, unburdened by the social and cultural expectations of blackness of the past and moving beyond the conventional binary of black and white. Reflecting this multiplicity of perspectives, the plays in this collection explode the traditional ways of representing black families on the American stage, and create new means to consider the interplay of race, with questions of class, gender, and sexuality. They engage and critique current definitions of black and African-American identity, as well as previous limitations placed on what constitutes blackness and black theatre. Written by the emerging stars of American theatre such as Eisa Davis and Marcus Gardley, the plays explore themes as varied as family and individuality, alienation and gentrification, and reconciliation and belonging. They demonstrate a wide-range of formal and structural innovations for the American theatre, and reflect the important ways in which contemporary playwrights are expanding the American dramatic canon with new and diverse means of representation. Edited by two leading US scholars in black drama, Harry J. Elam Jr (Stanford) and Douglas A. Jones Jr (Princeton), this cutting edge anthology gathers together some of the most exciting new American plays, selected by a rigorous academic backbone and explored in depth by supporting critical material.

The Captive Stage offers the first cultural history of proslavery ideology in the antebellum United States. While previous studies of performance and literary culture in the period have overwhelmingly focused on an antislavery theme, in fact the majority of representations of slavery before the Civil War explicitly defended the institution or accepted it as constitutive of American life. To address this lacuna, Douglas A. Jones, Jr. traces the pervasiveness of proslavery ideology in the antebellum period, charting its functionality in the social, cultural, and racial imaginary in the most unexpected of places: the free North. Even after northern states outlawed slavery in the late-18th and early-19th centuries, many of their constituencies continued to profit from imagining and embodying black bondage in positive terms. These gains were not just economic and political but also cognitive and psychological, and reflect the multiple and frequently contradictory ways that Americans across personal and collective difference used proslavery ideology to conceptualize the interrelation of race, subjectivity, and society. Furthermore, The Captive Stage pays particular attention to the ways in which African Americans' claims to universal freedom and citizenship influenced the shape of these proslaveryinflected conceptualizations.