Black Nativities: Transgressing Tradition

Abstract

Since 1961, Langston Hughes’ Black Nativity has been regularly performed in the United States. Scholar Macelle Mahala locates it “at the intersection of religion, theatre, politics, and cultural practice.” Hughes’ Black Nativity “re-imagines both the narrative and performance of Christ’s birth in a way that creates an African American cultural space in a holiday performance season otherwise dominated by European works such as Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Handel’s Messiah, and Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker” (Mahala). In Lemmons’ adaptation, the filmmaker’s aesthetics and new framing devices depart from the original approach and multiply the purposes her Nativity will serve, giving a nod to the realities of upward mobility, class progress in the black community, and the growing class divide. The primary focus of this chapter is to read Lemmons’ Black Nativity through the lens of what Bertram Ashe (Theorizing the Post-Soul Aesthetic: An Introduction. African American Review, 41(4), 609–622, 2007) calls the ‘post soul matrix’—an analytical framework for more carefully cataloguing and sorting the artistic sensibilities of a new generation that views blackness as constantly in flux.

I’m happy when I get to tell black stories. But that doesn’t mean I can’t connect to white stories. As African Americans, we’re well-versed in the dominant language. And when you look at characters as human, and at movies as being about the human experience, you can relate to anything. But a movie—it has to speak to me. It has to talk to me.

—Kasi Lemmons