Celia, a slave
By: Barbara Seyda ; foreword by Nicholas Wright
Series: The Yale drama series; Yale drama series
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 94
ISBN-13: 9780300197068
Subjects: Drama; Women slaves
Description: "Barbara Seyda's stunningly theatrical Celia, a Slave is a vivid tableau of interviews with the dead that interweaves oral histories with official archival records. Powerful, poetic, and stylistically bold, this work foregrounds twenty-three diverse characters to recall the events that led to the hanging of nineteen-year-old Celia, an African American slave convicted in a Missouri court of murdering her master, the prosperous landowner Robert Newsom, in 1855. Excavating actual trial transcripts and court records, Seyda bears witness to racial and sexual violence in U.S. history, illuminating the brutal realities of female slave life in the pre-Civil War South while exploring the intersection of rape, morality, economics, and gender politics that continue to resonate today"--Back cover.