Associate Professor Proudfit published an essay in Theatre History Studies on Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' 2014 play "Appropriate."
Scott Proudfit, coordinator of the Drama & Theatre Studies program and associate professor of English, published an article titled “Stop Your Sobbing: White Fragility, Slippery Empathy, and Historical Consciousness in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s ‘Appropriate'” in the most recent volume of Theatre History Studies.
The essay offers. a reading of Jacobs-Jenkins’ 2014 play through the lens of white fragility. It draws on critical theory in Saidiya Hartman’s “Scenes of Subjection” (1997) and Susan Sontag’s “Regarding the Pain of Others” (2003) to consider the limits of empathy in theatrical depictions and reception of histories of racial violence.
“Appropriate” tells the story of the grown white children of a recently-deceased white D.C. politician who return to their crumbling homestead in Arkansas, a former plantation, to organize and sell off his effects. During their preparation for a public auction and in the midst of typical dysfunctional family squabbles, the Lafayette siblings discover among their patriarch’s possessions lynching photographs and souvenirs. For much of the remainder of the play, the siblings insist that their father could not have had any relationship to this history of racial violence or its memorializing.