The Post-Colonial Black Body Anonymous College

Black body has a relatively long history and there has always been certain approaches and meanings assigned to this particular body in dramatic writings as in the cases of The Tropical Breeze Hotel, That Old Black Magic and Pantomime, which are all post-colonial plays written in different times and places across the world going beyond national borders. It is a significant issue because black body is where race and gender come together; that is why, in these plays, we can see how the black female and male body are addressed in terms of racial and gender identity. Therefore, we can question the existence of racialization and sexualization of black female and male bodies in the post-colonial period with the assistance of these dramatic writings.

The Tropical Breeze Hotel, written in 1988 in the Caribbean by Maryse Condé, tells the story of a failed romance between an aging Guadeloupean former nude dancer called Emma and a Haitian revolutionist Ishmael to whom Emma opens her home in Paris in 1986. In their claustrophobic environment, these two people coming from different places and having different mindset about world meets. As Emily Sahakian asserts in her article that Condé refuses “essentialist notions of black womanhood” and...