O’Neillian Echoes in Dennis Scott’s An Echo in the Bone (1974)

Commentators have frequently criticized Eugene O’Neill’s portrayals of Black characters and/or his handling of Black issues in plays such as The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings. However, O’Neill has always had high-profile Black defenders of his work. This article explores the intertextual tributes that Black Jamaican writer Dennis Scott pays to O’Neill in his seminal 1974 play An Echo in the Bone. By using The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape as intertexts, Scott is simultaneously paying tribute to his playwriting predecessor, while also effectively revising what he sees as the less authentic or underdeveloped aspects of O’Neill’s attempts to depict Black experiences and perspectives. O’Neill’s presumption that he can handle Black material was shared by numerous twentieth-century writers from Irish backgrounds, all of whom were implicitly or explicitly linking Irish marginalization at the hands of WASP Americans or the English to anti-Black racism.