[Jaye Austin Williams’s research] will become a significant contribution to the critical archive on African American theatre.…[S]he will become a highly sought after voice in the field.
My research meditates on the way in which black suffering – as a grammar – in the modern world, which is also to say black joy, remains illegible to the dominant vantage. There are, nonetheless, ways of writing that historical experience “allegorhythmically” – i.e., writing that is at once algorithmic, as the homonym suggests, describing, and complicating, the rules that define a sequence of social operations; and a rhythmic interruption, or syncopation, of the founding allegory of the Aristotelian paradigm for Western dramatic literature and performance – Plato’s Cave.