Alice Childress était une dramaturge et auteure américaine qui s'est concentrée sur la représentation de la vie des défavorisés au sein de la société. Ses œuvres, souvent situées sur fond de guerres mondiales, explorent des relations humaines complexes, des tensions raciales et des amours interdites. Childress a magistralement mêlé un réalisme cru à une profonde humanité, créant des récits percutants et provocateurs. Sa voix singulière et son engagement à éclairer les 'déshérités' dans une société d'abondance en font une figure marquante de la littérature américaine.
"Following the rehearsal process for a new Broadway production of an anti-lynching play, Alice Childress's wry and moving look at racism, identity, and ego in the world of New York theater opened to acclaim off-Broadway in 1955. When Wiletta, a Black actress and veteran of the stage, challenges the play's stereotypical portrayal of the Black characters, unsettling biases come to the forefront and reveal the ways so-called progressive art can be used to uphold racist attitudes and practices. Trouble in Mind is a prescient work that remains starkly relevant to the dynamics in the present-day theater world"--
Like One of the Family, which provides historical context for Kathryn Stockett's novel, The Help, is comprised of a series of conversations between Mildred, a black domestic, and her friend Marge. They create a vibrant picture of the life of a black working woman in New York in the 1950s. Rippling with satire and humor, Mildred’s outspoken accounts capture vividly her white employers’ complacency and condescension—and startled reactions to a maid who speaks her mind. As Mildred declares to a patronizing employer that she is not just like one of the family, or explains to Marge how a tricky employer has created a system of “half days off” to cheat her help, we gain a glimpse not only of one woman’s day-to-day struggle, but of her previous ache of racial oppression. A domestic who refuses to exchange dignity for pay, Mildred is an inspiring conversationalist, a dragon slayer in a segregated world. The conversations in the book were first published in Freedom, the newspaper edited by Paul Robeson, and later in the Baltimore Afro-American. The book was originally published in the 1950s by in Brooklyn–based Independence Press, and Beacon Press brought out a new edition of it in 1986 with an introduction by the literary and cultural critic Trudier Harris.
The life of a thirteen-year-old Harlem youth on his way to becoming a confirmed heroin addict is seen from his viewpoint and from that of several people around him
Hlavní hrdinkou je černošská služka Mildred, která večer po práci hovoří se svou kamarádkou Marge o všem možném, o hudbě, mužích, stáří, cestování, zaměstnavatelích...
