2026 Theses Master's

Reclamation in Black: The Expansive Practice of Creating and Holding Black Being in African American Storytelling

Ziglar, Sara

My thesis explores the concept of Reclamation Dramaturgy as a vital practice in African American artmaking. The project emerges from my practice as a performer, dramaturg, and educator, working within Black performance traditions. Black Art in the United States and across the African diaspora has long served as a site of reclamation—where memory, body, and language resist erasure and assert agency through presence. Yet critical tools for analyzing and teaching these practices often remain rooted in Eurocentric aesthetics. By building a framework centered in black embodiment I plan to foreground reclamation dramaturgy as both an artistic methodology and an analytical practice. Reclamation Dramaturgy refers to the ways Black artists across disciplines reassert ownership over history, aesthetics, and narrative, transforming art-making into acts of resistance, survival, and cultural continuity. With this lens, the project will examine works of dance, theatre, and literature within the African diaspora, with a particular emphasis on the United States, to uncover activities of reclamation that sustain and evolve Black storytelling traditions.

Throughout my academic career, I have been aware of the omission of black arts studies as a core curriculum and a central area of scholarship. This information is not new. In theater programs a selected set of plays written by African Americans are folded into the western canon. An official part of the recorded archive of acceptable art. Black dance forms experience a similar treatment. Even when included the works are discussed using frameworks and measures that do not consider the fullness of the cultural influences that shape African American artforms. Those that make an attempt begin from the white gaze and speak from outside of the traditions. I am not the first person to dig into scholarship in response to this reality. But much of the work of my predecessors focused on legitimizing the work of black artists, in hopes of securing real estate within the Western art canon or suggests divesting from the western canon completely. Both of these approaches fail to close the gaps in the discourse about black art. I am approaching this project with the acknowledgement that black art is a creolization of cultures and will continue to exist with or without a place in the canon. In defining reclamation dramaturgy I aim to close gaps in the discourse around black art and the ways it’s created. I am creating this framework so that I can have better conversations with collaborators during the creative process. I am creating this framework so that I can have better public conversations with artists and audiences about black art.

I imagine reclamation dramaturgy as a tool for discourse and analysis that is expansive in its engagement with black art and black artmaking. To do this, I am building on the knowledge and creation of my ancestors and predecessors. These people work across media and disciplines within academic scholarship and artistic practice. Many of them are listed in my bibliography. Others I acknowledge directly in my writing, and there are those that I am unable to call by name. I am grateful to them all. The theoretical foundation for reclamation dramaturgy draws from Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, which frames Black existence as one shaped by ongoing afterlives of slavery; Brenda Dixon Gottschild’s articulation of Africanist aesthetics in American performance, which makes visible Black cultural influence across artistic forms. I also use principles from The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond’s Undoing Racism framework to think about ways that systems of power are normalized and made invisible even in artistic processes. And part of reclamation is making the invisible visible in order to shift patterns of belief about what is good, and what art is meant to do.

While on a dance company residency in Uganda, a friend and fellow company member introduced me to Christina Sharpe’s first book is In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Throughout the book she invites her reader to participate in a series of thinking exercises that ideally bring clarity to what she names - the “orthography of the wake” - a language system that includes representations of black life and their relationship to the metaphysical geography of the place she calls the wake. The wake includes multiple locations that provide insights on reading black being in the various “afterlives of slavery” that uphold state sanctioned antiblackness. She defines what the wake is using conventional definitions attached to terminology in nautical navigation, ritual practices of grief and mourning, and the discharge of weapons. Also inside the book is Sharpe’s invitation is the desire to incite the action of wake work. Wake work is anchored inside artistic production, resistance, consciousness, and the possibility of living instead of surviving death and non-being . Within the wake framework reclamation exists as an activity at the site of artistic production. But I see reclamation dramaturgy as a way to expand the ontology of black being beyond the wake of white supremacy and anti-blackness. When reclamation dramatury functions inside of black artwork it can dismantle expose and dismantle the effects of the wake and present possibility models for black being that do not depend the wake for validation.

Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts by Brenda Dixson Gottschild was one of my first introductions into thinking critically about art from a perspective outside of a eurocentric aesthetic. Gottschild pulls from research by scholars in Black Studies, Performance Studies, Theater, and Dance, and provides an aesthetic framework for critical analysis of artworks of American Performance. The framework contains five elements: embracing the conflict, polycentrism/polyrhythm, high-affect juxtaposition, ephebism, and the aesthetic of the cool. Her application of these elements to the works of George Balanchine, postmodern dance, and minstrelsy provides an example of how to excavate African cultural heritage within American Art. It calls out ways out ways that images of blackness have been commodified and propagandized to produce a narrative that benefits whiteness. These benefits persist at the social death of black people a precursor for actual death without accountability and recourse. The same images and stereotypes are then repackaged as “cool”, innovative, and the product of white intellect completing a process of cultural appropriation. The same appropriation that when viewed through the lens of history has black people embrace the lies that are designed to kill them and keep them in the hold of subjugation. Within reclamation dramaturgy I want to apply this excavation process to identify the specific ways that African storytelling are restored in works of Black Art and to determine whether a work of art is actively functioning as an archive of blackness. Artwork that functions as an embodied archive of African culture offers those who experience it the opportunity to learn from history and participate in acts of reclamation long after their experience with the artwork has ended.

What interests me most is how the Africanist Aesthetic collectively serves the practice of reclamation in Black Art Making Practices. I am also interested in the conversation between this aesthetic and the insistence on declaring black existence that Christina Sharpe focuses on in In the Wake particularly “the need of diasporan African peoples to simultaneously conceal and reveal, disguise and display themselves in alien, if not hostile, New World environments” (Gottschild, 12). Both scholars reference the need for these practices in the face of and response to external violence. Sharpe’s Wake framework identifies the violence through the lens of chattel slavery and its after lives. Gottschild’s framing is general contextextulizing the hostility of New World environments as a setup to describe the response that is the Africanist Aesthetic. I argue that the new world environments never get old because with each aesthetic response created, a new after life of chattel slavery is introduced. Each successful assertion of black identity and humanity through the archive that is African American Art elicits a response from the weather. When black artwork functions as an archive for African culture, it serves as a tool for wake work. The archive supports the activities of attending to black being and suffering, defending the dead, caring for the black person living in the push towards death, and holding a counternarrative that disrupts the intentional forgetting, erasure, and violence imposed on “black being” by the dominant cultural archive as a means of oppression and subjugation. This call and response between the aesthetics of blackness and the wake creates a cycle of resilience for black being in the wake. What it does not create is a way out.

I was introduced to the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB) towards the beginning of my professional dance career. The organization has a longstanding relationship with Urban Bush Women (UBW). In college, I participated in several workshops with UBW’s founder and first artistic director, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. She would speak about her integration of the PISAB principles into the company’s creative process. At that time, all company members were required to participate in the Undoing Racism® training and consider themselves as artists and organizers. The training was also built into UBW’s summer intensive and BOLD leadership training programs. In the mid 2010s, I had the opportunity to participate in the training as part of a professional development program offered through my work with Red Clay Dance Company.

The Undoing Racism® training takes place over the course of two and a half days. It aims to facilitate participants' activation as community organizers committed to making social change through anti-racist principles. Essentially, they are committed to undoing racism in every space they enter and assisting others in doing the same. The first day of the workshop is a half-day and is dedicated to community building and defining shared terminology for racism, white privilege, and power. The next two days are a mix of large group conversations around identifying how anti-blackness and structural racism show up and are embedded in every area of society, and practical ways to increase their visibility and actively work to disrupt and dismantle their harm and existence. The principles of Undoing Racism® are designed to address many of the systems that Christina Sharpe identifies as the weather in the wake. My participation in this workshop pushed me to think about ways to actualize my beliefs that I had not considered before. This is why it was vital for me to include the principles of Undoing Racism® as a key part of the foundation for the research and creation of reclamation dramaturgy. They speak directly to the creation of a space I am calling the beyond. While much of the experience is meant to be practical and embodied, PISAB does provide information about the principles on its website. Together with my memory, I will use PISAB’s principles in conversation with the work of Christina Sharpe and Brenda Dixon Gottchild to inform my mapping practice and to imagine how these organizing tools help artists and audiences participate in rituals that can build the beyond. Because as much as this project is about building a better way to talk about black art it is also about building better ways to talk about black being.

Keywords: Reclamation, African American Storytelling, Theater, African Aesthetic