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'Black Is The New White is Nakkiah Lui’s romantic comedy commissioned by the Sydney Theatre Company for the May/June 2017 season. It milks laughs from a stereotypical narrative of a privileged young black woman bringing her inappropriate boyfriend home to meet her parents. The twist— although not much of one these days—is that the boyfriend is white. Black Is The New White is also the name of the 2007 autobiography by African American comic genius Paul Mooney. We can reach further back to the early 1990s: to Gordon Bennett’s sweet watercolours of black angels and his more ghoulish messenger between worlds, the large scarified Altered Body Print (Shadow Figure Howling at the Moon) (1994) with its mashed binaries and grotesque white/black, male/female, human/ animal totemic‑like monster. Before Bennett there was Tracey Moffatt’s sweet black angel Jimmy Little on the royal telephone to heaven, an ironic serenade to her grim horror film, Night Cries (1989), which unsettled normative understandings of black/ white relations with chilling effect.' (Introduction)
Notes
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Epigraph: Seemingly fixed discourse positions are … mixed up. Black becomes white – white becomes black. Thomas Reinhardt on Kader Attia’s exhibition Repair. 5 Acts.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Last amended 16 Jun 2017 08:26:13
Subjects:
- Black Is the New White 2017 single work drama
- Night Cries : A Rural Tragedy 1989 single work film/TV
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