“Ilka Saal’s analytic approach to [Parks's and Walker's] works through historiopoesis not only illuminates these texts in new ways, but also provides an analytic framework to understand other plays and narrative texts that emerge from this generation of Black artists. . . . It enables her to bring Parks’s work—distinctly theatrical—into conversation with Walker’s, which she effectively argues is performative because of its scale and the various ways in which her audience interacts with the installations.”—American Literary History
“Collusions of Fact and Fiction expands the critical discourse on two artists central to the Black postmodern: playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and visual artist Kara Walker. Highlighting the poststructuralist understanding of history that subtends both artists’ bodies of work, this book offers a new map to a vital territory in contemporary culture.”—Arlene R. Keizer, author, Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery
“An accomplished work of scholarship. Drawing on an authoritative command of the literature and a dexterous use of theory, Saal puts forward a clear and compelling interpretation of two major contemporary Black artists. At the same time, she develops a novel theory of contemporary Black aesthetic production called historiopoeisis.”—Tavia Nyong’o, Yale University