We are pleased to share the attached Call for Papers for The Routledge Companion to American Black and Latine History Plays, a forthcoming edited collection with Routledge.
We invite scholars, researchers, and practitioners to contribute to this volume, which explores the rich traditions of Black and Latine historical drama and the ways theatre engages with history, memory, identity, resistance, and cultural representation.
We welcome contributions addressing a range of topics, including slavery, colonialism, and conquest; historical representations of heroes and (s)heroes; intersectionality; documentary drama; historical pageants; and historical musicals.
Why Submit?
– Global readership and indexing in major academic databases
– Peer Review
– Opportunity to contribute to a high-impact interdisciplinary dialogue
Submission Process:
Submit abstract via email. Specify topic as follows; (e.g., Intersectionality.abstract.jsmith)
Submit your manuscript via email. Specify topic as follows; (e.g., Intersectionality.essay.jsmith)
Submission Guidelines:
– Manuscript length should be 5,000 – 8,000 words (including references)
– Chicago Manual of Style, 18th edition format
– Submitted in English
– Submissions must be unpublished and not yet under review elsewhere
Abstract Deadline: January 2, 2027
Abstracts should be 300-500 words and accompanied by a 50-word biography.
Abstracts & Essays should be submitted to: BLHP.bk@gmail.com
Full Paper Submission Deadline: June 15, 2027
Notification of Acceptance: August 15, 2027
Inquiries should be sent to: BLHP.admin@gmail.com
This comprehensive reference book will be published December 2028.
Potential Questions/Issues for Authors:
Slavery, Colonialism, and Conquest –
● How do plays about slavery explore the psychological, historical, and modern legacies of
chattel slavery?
● How do plays about slavery focus on how past racial trauma impacts contemporary
relationships, identity, power dynamics, and social structures?
● How do plays about Latine colonialism and conquest explore themes of identity, power
dynamics, and resistance against colonialism?
● How do these plays reflect the complex interplay between Indigenous cultures and
colonial forces, highlighting both the oppression and resilience of marginalized
communities?
Heroes and S(Heroes) –
● Analyze how playwrights represent Black and/or Latine American heroes, exploring
themes of racial identity, social justice, and the struggles against systemic oppression.
● How do these theatrical narratives highlight personal and collective experiences,
showcasing resilience and the quest for equality in the face of adversity?
● How is the relationship between leaders, movements, and collective efforts against
oppression depicted in historical dramas?
Intersectionality –
● Explore how history plays excavate the past by depicting women’s and queer experiences
as central to historical struggles for personal and collective liberation.
● The emergence of feminist historiography around 1976 has been amplified by innovative
historical dramas written between 1976 and 2010 that present women’s pasts through a new
critical lens.
● Within the framework of contemporary feminism – including the pivotal #metoo
movement, analyze how post-2000 feminist drama represents the past by delving into the
recurring tropes and their politics in the light of current feminist debate, and looking at how
these plays essentially re-imagine gender politics.
● How do Black and Latine women and non-binary people articulate historical struggles
against gender hierarchies from an intersectional perspective? Topics may include
womanism, hood feminism, and trans feminism.
● How are non-heteronormative sexual identities and experiences depicted in historical
dramas? How are struggles for recognition and rights of LGBTQ+ individuals and
communities depicted as part of black and Latine liberation efforts?
Genre Study –
● Analyze documentary dramas as historical evidence challenging the nation’s official
paperwork with embodied archives of survival.
● Explore the pageant as a celebration of identity, significance of context and politics.
● Explore the roots, content, impact, production practices of historical musicals.
● Develop case studies exploring what the “Black musical” and the “Latine musical” are,
how they work, and why they matter.
● Compare and contrast notable works from different expressive cultures and times, such as
Peculiar Sam; or, The Underground Railroad and Mexodus, with one other.
● How and why have musical theater writers of color represented race, ethnicity, and nation,
e.g., Blackness, Latinidad, and the US, both sonically and visually?
● In what ways have musical theater writers of color complicated popular and predominant
white representations of the Black and Latine communities on the stage?
● In what ways have musical theater writers of color imagined alternatives to the supremacy
of integrated book musicals and whiteness via form and style?
● Explore historical accuracy of historical dramas, the relationship with the audience, and
the underlying political ideology.
General –
● Examine and interrogate the diverse history play genres with a comparison of plays deemed
historical that fall outside “standard” definitions of the history play.
● What are some of the challenges of remembering and reenvisioning history through the
lens of theatre?
● Compare history plays before and after the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
● Analyze how history plays (or a particular history play) explore race, moment, and milieu.
● Analyze the changing understanding of history itself through time and the ways in which
playwrights have engaged with both the history of their own time, and the history of other
times and cultures as it reflects their own.
● Explore the evolving and recurring strategies of world making, activism, and resistance
taken by Latine and Black culture makers to gain political agency on and off the stage.
● How can Sandra L. Richards’ theory of writing the absent potential help us–as artists,
educators, and scholars–to look backward while going forward?
● Analyze performance scholar Diana Taylor’s call to consider the ways that “embodied and
performed acts generate, record, and transmit knowledge.
● Explore new writing that makes powerful theatrical use of the past but does not fit into
critics’ familiar categories of historical drama.
● Explore the assertion that many history plays are becoming more complex and layered in
their aesthetic approaches, as playwrights work through the experience of being surrounded
by numerous and varied forms of historical representation in the twenty-first century.
● Interpreting how new writing relies on the past and notions of historicity to generate
meaning and resonance in the present.
● Explore what Black and Latine history play techniques and formulas have been popular,
the tropes that are widely used, and how artists have found ways of renewing or overturning
established conventions.
● Investigate the relationships between performance, identity, intersectionality, and activism
in America in history plays.
● Analyze the use of heritage, historical record, and creative license as tools through which
we can consider what cultural authority is being drawn on in specific moments within a
history play, addressing both playwriting and performance practice
