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Angela's Mixtape / The History of Light

Eisa Davis author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:53rd State Press

Published:22nd Feb '24

£11.99

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Angela's Mixtape / The History of Light cover

Trained in classical piano and Marxism and raised on jazz, gospel, pop, hip hop, and Black revolutionary politics, Pulitzer Prize finalist Eisa Davis’s plays are marked by her stunning intimacy with the praxis of music alongside radical change. In Angela's Mixtape, time shifts like a mixtape, and like a mixtape, the play is both a memoir and a gift—for us, of course, and for Davis’s aunt, activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis, under whose tutelage Davis reads Das Kapital and learns to drive stick and hack her own way toward inheriting her legacy. In The History of Light, Davis counterpoints the intertwining fates of two couples under racialized pressures a generation apart. Lush with the sound of the grand piano, The History of Light is a study in black and white, love and alienation. Underlying the political clarity and formal virtuosity of Davis’s writing are the unexpected crackles of a voice warming up, the crunchiness of missed notes. Because for an artist concerned, like Davis, with how we become who we are and might be, error is a necessary instrument—maybe the sounding weight.

"A revealing portrait of a young artist (born in 1970, while her aunt is in prison) struggling to find herself, while growing up in the shadow of three enormously strong, brilliant, and successful black women steeped in radical sixties politics." * New Yorker on Angela's Mixtape *
"[An] appropriately turbulent and quite funny show about the forces that influence the forging of identity....the strange juxtaposition of the prosaic trials of adolescence and the urgent radicalism of the family politics is also what gives the show its own distinctive identity." * New York Times on Angela's Mixtape *

ISBN: 9781732545298

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

225 pages