Voicing The Subaltern: Gender, Agency, And Resistance in Pearl Cleage's Flyin' West and Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus

Abstract

African American women’s drama has consistently challenged literary and theatrical traditions that have marginalized Black women’s experiences, bodies, histories, and voices. Pearl Cleage’s Flyin’ West (1992) and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus (1996) offer particularly productive sites for examining the relationship between subalternity, gender, agency, and resistance. Although the two plays emerge from different historical contexts, both interrogate the structures through which Black women are positioned, represented, controlled, and remembered. This paper presents a conceptual and critical comparative reading of the two plays through Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s theorization of subalternity, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality, Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought, and bell hooks’s critique of racialized and gendered power. It argues that “voicing the subaltern” should not be understood simply as giving speech to a previously silent subject. Rather, it involves examining the structures that determine who can speak, whose speech becomes intelligible, who controls representation, and how marginalized women negotiate those structures. In Flyin’ West, Black women construct community, mobility, self-determination, and collective resistance against racial and patriarchal violence. In Venus, Parks exposes the violent relationship between spectacle, colonial knowledge, racialized desire, and the Black female body. Read together, the plays reveal a movement from imposed representation toward contested self-definition. The study proposes that African American women’s drama does not merely recover marginalized voices; it critically interrogates the politics of representation itself.