Contemporary African-American Drama at Visuality’s Limits

Since the publication of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in 1952, invisibility and hypervisibility have ranked among the central metaphors of black cultural production and the critical discourse on blackness. This article takes Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brothers Size (2007) and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview (2018) as case studies for discussion of the ways in which contemporary African-American dramatists engage the familiar (and co-constitutive) poles of invisibility and hypervisibility to advance a new, more relational model for visualizing blackness. The article argues that pairing the plays uncovers an under-examined resonance between longstanding conversations in theatre and performance studies about disappearance and recent ones across disciplines on opacity.