《黑人的开心馆》:私刑书写与身体政治

Writing Lynching and Body Politics in Funnyhouse of a Negro

阿德里安娜·肯尼迪的《黑人的开心馆》将萨拉及其父亲之死转化为私刑的历史隐喻,以影射白人社会对非裔美国人持续施加的身体政治。该剧利用萨拉与其四个"自我",意指"私刑"在美国社会得以实施的多重深层原因,进而揭示私刑蕴含的荒谬性。而通过将萨拉及其父亲遭受"私刑"的创伤经历纳入整个非裔美国民族的创伤记忆,该剧的私刑书写表明,萨拉的疯癫和死亡表征了非裔美国身体的抵抗力量,能消解"凝视"机制下非裔美国人的自我仇恨及治愈历史的创伤,从而"打破美国身体政治的幻想",最终构建起全新的非裔美国主体。

By envisioning the death of Sarah and her father as a historical metaphor for lynching, Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro alludes to the body politics that American whites persistently impose on African Americans. Sarah and her four "selves" in this play signify the multiple wrongs lynching enacted in American society. With Sara and her father’s traumatic experiences of lynching incorporated into the collective memory of all African Americans, the lynching written in the play shows that Sarah’s madness and death, which represents the power of resistance within the African American body, can eliminate self-hatred through the gaze and heal historical traumas, thus constructing African American subjectivity by way of "shattering the illusion of American body politics".